Currently, I am an Assistant Professor at the Baylor College of Medicine‘s Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy. I am also a Clinical Ethicist on the Clinical Ethics Consultation Service at Houston Methodist Hospital. In my role as Clinical Ethics Faculty, I provide teaching in bioethics, work on original research, and contribute to the coordination and staffing of the Ethics Consult Team.
Prior to my work at BCM, I completed a Clinical Ethics Fellowship at the UCLA Health Ethics Center from 2021-2023. There, I provided supervised clinical ethics consultation, on call coverage, and education throughout the UCLA Health system, as well as assistance with policy development and service on three ethics committees.
I earned my PhD in Philosophy at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center in 2021, focusing on ethics, applied ethics (especially bioethics), and moral psychology. My dissertation examined the theoretical underpinnings of informed consent, and argued that it serves to protect what I termed the bodily self-sovereignty of patients. I also considered two ‘case studies’ that illustrate the moral importance of securing informed consent – consent in psychiatrically-ill populations, and consent to research that involves modification of the genetic germline.
In addition to my scholarly endeavors, I taught widely throughout New York City for the better part of a decade. I also served as an Ethics Fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) and an Associate Fellow at the GE2P2 Global Foundation.
Before coming to CUNY, I attended Columbia University as a John Jay Scholar, majoring in Philosophy and concentrating in Political Science. I graduated magna cum laude with departmental honors in Philosophy in 2009.
Aside from here, you can find me (and my work) on the internet at ORCiD, Academia.edu, PhilPeople, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and LinkedIn.
Photo credit: Gary Ostertag
Joanna Smolenski, PhD 