Affiliates

Nick Bansback is an Assistant Professor in the School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia. His research aims to inform policies and practices in health through the application of decision theory. Much of his work to date has focussed on informing resource allocation policy decisions through: measuring and valuing public preferences, and developing decision-analytic models. His emerging research focus seeks to improve decision making at the patient/physician consultation using novel decision support tools based on behavioral economic theory.

Andrew Baron is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. His work examines the cultural and cognitive processes that support the acquisition and development of social knowledge structures in children. More over, his work draws on methods from social, developmental and cognitive psychology to examine how attitudes toward and beliefs about social groups form at both an implicit and an explicit level of analysis from infancy through late adolescence. In addition to its relevance to social justice and tolerance education, this work speaks to constraints on social, conceptual, and cognitive development as well as to dual-process theories of social cognition. Andrew is also director of the Living Laboratory at Science World at TELUS World of Science, Canada’s first university-museum partnership to provide the public with daily access to university scientists and opportunities to observe, participate and learn from real experiments.

Timothy Caulfield is a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy and a Professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta. He is also the Research Director of the Health Law and Science Policy Group (HeaLS). Over the past several years, he has been involved in a variety of interdisciplinary research endeavours that have allowed him to publish over 200 articles and book chapters. He has won numerous academic awards, publishes frequently in the popular press, and been involved with a number of national and international policy and research ethics committees. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

Jennifer Chandler is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa, where she teaches mental health law and neuroethics, medical legal issues, tort law, and legal philosophy.  Her research  focuses on the law and ethics of neuroscience and other advances in biology and medicine.  Specific research projects relate to legal issues related to memory, the use of neuroscientific and behavioural genetic evidence in Canadian courts, the law and ethics of legally-coerced consent to medical treatment, organ donation policy and the impact of the popularization of neuroscience on end of life decision-making and public support for organ donation, and the law and ethics of scientific inquiry and restrictions on scientific research.

Eric H. Chudler is a research neuroscientist interested in how the brain processes information about pain and nociception.  Eric received his Ph.D. from the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington (1985), did his postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD (1986-1989) and worked as an instructor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA (1989-1991). He is currently a research associate professor in the Departments of Bioengineering, Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine and the Graduate Program of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of Washington.   Recently he became the executive director of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.  Eric also works with other neuroscientists and classroom teachers to develop educational materials to help young students learn about the brain.

Susan Cox is Associate Professor at The W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics at UBC. Dr. Cox specializes in qualitative health research and is currently conducting research on the meaning and experience of being a human subject in health research and, more recently, on the use of arts-based methods in health research. Dr. Cox serves on the Research Ethics Board for Emily Carr University of Art and Design and the Ethics Task Force for the Society for the Arts in Healthcare. When times permits, she writes poetry and is an aspiring pastry chef.

Dr. Emma Cunliffe is an Assistant Professor in the UBC Faculty of Law. She has won the Killam Award for Teaching Excellence and the George Curtis Memorial Award for Teaching. Growing awareness of wrongful convictions has led to an understanding that some commonly used expert evidence is unreliable, and that courts have not historically done a good job of identifying and excluding low-quality expert testimony. Dr. Cunliffe's research focuses on scientific and behavioural evidence in child homicide trials; and more generally considers the interplay between expert (non-legal) knowledges, cultural knowledges and legal reasoning. She is the author of Murder, Medicine and Motherhood (Hart Publishing, 2011) which examines the case of Kathleen Folbigg, a mother who was convicted of murdering her children based on misleading medical evidence. Her book demonstrates how legal process, medical knowledge and expectations of motherhood work together when a mother is charged with killing infants who have died in mysterious circumstances. With funding from SSHRC, she is working with Professor Christine Boyle on a project examining child homicide cases in Canada. Dr Cunliffe is a member of the editorial boards for the International Journal of Evidence & Proof and the Australian Feminist Law Journal.

Gidon Felsen is an Assistant Professor in the Physiology and Biophysics Department at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. His research focuses on the neural bases of making decisions and controlling motor output, under normal and pathological conditions. Prior to joining the faculty at the U. of Colorado, Dr. Felsen spent a summer as a Visiting Scholar at the National Core for Neuroethics, investigating how findings from neuroscience can inform our conception of autonomy. He continues to be interested in the interplay between autonomous and effective decision making in real-world situations.

Dan Goldowitz is Senior Scientist at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, University of British Columbia, Canada Research Chair in Developmental Neurogenetics, and Scientific Director of NeuroDevNet. Dr. Goldowitz has pioneered approaches to ascertain the function of genes in brain and behaviour, and was a leading force in organizing researchers across the State of Tennessee in forming the Tennessee Mouse Genome Consortium which won one of three National Institute’s of Health awards with Dr. Goldowitz as Principal Investigator. These and other successes led the University of Tennessee to award Dr. Goldowitz an endowed chair of Neurosciences at UTHSC. Since his move to UBC, Dr. Goldowitz has maintained strong NIH- , CIHR- and foundation-funded research programs in the genetics of brain development and function, culminating in the establishment in 2009 of NeuroDevNet, a Networks of Centres of Excellence.

Anita Ho is an Assistant Professor at the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics, specializing in bioethics and research ethics.  She is particularly interested in various concepts of trust and autonomy, health-care access and disparity, physician-patient relationship, minority care experience, decision-making models, cross-cultural ethics, disability and mental health ethics, and human rights issues.  Her work in these areas has been supported by both the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR).  In addition to her position at the Centre, she is currently the Director of Ethics Services for Providence Health Care and associate chair/ethicist for the UBC Behavioral Research Ethics Board.

Wendy Hulko is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC and is affiliated with both the National Core for Neuroethics and the Centre for Research on Personhood in Dementia at UBC Vancouver. She holds degrees in Sociology and Spanish (BA), Social Work (MSW), and Sociology and Social Policy (PhD) and has worked in the field of aging since 1993, including long term care nursing, hospital social work, and government policy. Wendy is currently leading a community-based research project on culturally safe dementia care for Secwepemc Nation Elders funded by the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and is a co-investigator on Judy Illes’ Wellness in Alzheimer Disease project. 

Michelle LeBaron is a dispute resolution scholar and Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia. She is an award-winning teacher whose current work focuses on how creative and expressive arts transform conflicts across cultures and foster resilience. With advanced degrees in law and psychotherapy, Michelle’s interdisciplinary and accessible books span diverse practice and geographical contexts. Titles include Bridging Troubled Waters, Bridging Cultural Conflict, Conflict Across Cultures and the forthcoming Why Movement Matters on somatic intelligence and conflict. Previously, Professor LeBaron served on faculty at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Eric Racine, Ph.D., is Director of the Neuroethics Research Unit and Associate Research Professor at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal. He also holds academic appointments at the University of Montréal (Medicine and Bioethics) and McGill University (Biomedical ethics, Neurology and Neurosurgery, Medicine). Dr. Racine's research interests span a range of topics and methods with the goal of developing a pragmatic framework for bioethics based on empirical research and exploring its implications in concrete questions related to the ethical application of neuroscience in research, patient care, and public policy.

Urs Ribary is Professor of Psychology and BC LEEF Leadership Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience in Childhood Health and Development and professor at Simon Fraser University. He also holds faculty appointments in Pediatrics and Psychiatry at UBC, and is the director of the Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Institute (BCNI) at SFU. His mission is to initiate and facilitate multimodal brain imaging research across disciplines and institutions to better understand the underlying neurophysiology of the human brain in health and disease. Especially, he is interested to incorporate functional brain network connectivity dynamics with structural and functional brain imaging to better characterize and quantify the detailed structural, functional and temporal connectivity and its alterations in cognitive disabilities and neuro-psychiatric pathologies including traumatic brain injury. The goal is to amplify team efforts towards translational objective neuro-diagnostic procedures for the human brain, to allow better monitoring and development of cognitive, pharmacological and surgical interventional strategies.

Michael Krausz MD, PhD, FRCPC., is Professor of Psychiatry, Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of British Columbia  Dr. Krausz pioneered large-scale studies regarding mental illness among intravenous drug users, in particular the German Heroin trial, the largest randomized clinical trial in addiction research in Europe. Dr. Krausz has founded and edited two scientific journals: European Addiction Research and Suchttherapie. With over 290 publications to date, Dr. Krausz was selected as the first Providence BC Leadership Chair for Addiction Research in 2005. He served on Senior Research Advisory Board from CCSA, the Research Advisory Council of the Michael Smith Foundation, the Kaiser foundation and as Co Chair of the Collaboration for Change in Vancouver.

Elizabeth M. Simpson, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UBC. Dr. Simpson is Project Leader for the Genome BC “CanEuCre: Genomic Resources Advancing Therapies for Brain Disorders”, which aims to develop new cre resources, a project that also incorporates research into the perceptions of gene therapy from online social media, led by Dr. Judy Illes.

The overall goal of Dr. Simpson’s research program is to use genetically engineered mouse models to understand and improve treatment for human brain and behaviour disorders. Her approach is to study the genetics, behaviour, neurogenesis, and genome-wide transcription in mouse models of brain disorders. The expectation is that a clearer understanding of abnormal behaviour and brain pathologies in humans will lead to new and improved therapeutic strategies for these devastating conditions.

David Silver holds the Chair in Business and Professional Ethics in the W. Maurice Young Centre in Applied Ethics and the Sauder School Business. He has done work in collective and corporate responsibility and the connections between applied ethics and basic moral theory. His current work is on the proper role of business in democratic society.