*This post was originally published on The Neuroethics Blog.

by Georgina Campelia

Georgina Campelia is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy at the Graduate Center, CUNY, working under the supervision of Virginia Held. Her dissertation, “Virtue’s Web: The Virtue of Empathic Attunement and the Need for a Relational Foundation,” develops an account of empathic attunement, defends its status as a virtue, and sketches a relational ontology of virtue that would better accommodate the relationality of this and other important virtues.

More broadly, Georgina’s research focuses on ethics and feminist theory, with particular interests in virtue ethics, care ethics, empathy, the interdependence of ethics and epistemology, and interrelational conceptions of persons. Georgina’s work extends this theoretical work to neuroethics and medical ethics, where much of her research concerns using virtue ethics and care ethics to guide patient care, establishing structures to enable and encourage empathy, and creating greater awareness of the relational constitution of patient identity and medical decisions.

Georgina is currently an affiliate instructor at the Montefiore Einstein Center for Bioethics, where she teaches in their Certificate and Masters Programs. She also serves on the Steering Committee at the New York Society for Women and Philosophy (NYSWIP) and is a co-organizer of SWIPshop (a workshop for feminist philosophy).

As the lack of empathy in the world has become particularly apparent and troubling in light of the resistance to offering asylum for Muslim refugees (see this recent article from The Guardian), perhaps it makes sense that the study of empathy is booming (Coplan, 2014; Decety, 2012; de Waal, 2009). Philosophers question and defend its moral worth (Bloom, 2014), psychologists and primatologists consider its nature and origin (Hoffman, 2000; Waal, 2012), and neuroscientists explore its metaphysical structure (Singer, 2009; Zaki & Ochsner, 2012). Empathy offers a distinctive ground for interdisciplinary work and, yet, little has been done to advance cross-field communication. While some popular work offers broadly incorporated perspectives (de Waal, 2009), and there are some anthologies that include multiple disciplines (Coplan & Goldie, 2014; Decety, 2012), there is room for more robustly integrated research.

Image of a baby macaque imitating facial expressions courtesy of Wikimedia. Read the rest of this entry »

Keerthi Shetty is a Hellman Fellow in Science and Technology Policy at the American Academy. She contributes to several projects in the Science, Engineering, and Technology program including the Public Face of Science, Human Performance Enhancement, the Alternative Energy Future, and New Models for U.S. Science and Technology Policy. The Human Performance Enhancement Project is a project aimed as exploring societal and ethical issues around invasive and noninvasive cognitive enhancement technologies. Keerthi joined the American Academy after completing her doctoral work in immunobiology at Yale University. Keerthi’s thesis research involved studying the recruitment of RAG1 and RAG2—two important proteins of the immune system that help create antibodies—to chromatinized DNA during V(D)J recombination. At Yale, she was the co-president of the Yale Science Diplomats, a science policy group. Leading this organization, Keerthi helped develop a science lecture series for local high schools and the general public, organized policy writing workshops and seminars, and contacted legislators about funding issues concerning biomedical research. She was also named an eIntern for the State Department’s Virtual Student Foreign Service program, where she assisted with global science and technology projects. Keerthi holds a Ph.D. in immunobiology from Yale University and an A.B. in molecular biology from Princeton University.