Hastings Center welcomes Ray as fellow
The Hastings Center has welcomed Keisha Ray, PhD, associate professor, and John P. McGovern, MD, Professor in Oslerian Medicine, as a member of its 2023 Class of Fellows.
Founded in 1969 by philosopher Daniel Callahan and psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin, the Hastings Center is the oldest independent, nonpartisan, interdisciplinary research institute of its kind in the world. Through publications and public engagement, the Hastings Center inserts human values and the value of bioethics into public conversations while providing platforms for a range of voices to express themselves and be heard.
Hastings Center fellows focus on a broad range of topics with ethical implications, including digital technologies, public health, disparities at the end of life, disability rights, institutional racism, pain and addiction, and climate change. Ray joins 12 other healthcare professionals in her class and more than 200 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and public understandings of complex ethical issues in health, health care, science, and technology.
“Being recognized by the most influential organization in bioethics for my contributions to the field is truly an honor,” Ray said. “I am proud to continue pursuing just and ethical health care for all people as a Hastings fellow.”
Ray’s research focuses on the efforts of institutional racism on Black people’s health, highlighting Black people’s own stories in Black health discourse and the sociopolitical implications of biomedical enhancement for marginalized populations. Her work uniquely prioritizes linguistic justice as a matter of access and commitment to public scholarship.
Ray’s most recent book, Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People’s Health, is on pace to be a top-selling book for Oxford University Press, while her next book, Identity and Meaning, co-edited by Nathan Carlin, PhD, professor, Samuel E. Karff, DHL Chair, and director of the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics, is forthcoming from Oxford.
Ray serves as an associate editor for the American Journal of Bioethics and is media editor for its blog Bioethics Today. She is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Clinical Ethics and the Journal of Medical Humanities and is the director of the medical humanities scholarly concentration at McGovern Medical School.