The Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics
and American Institutions

Presenters for 2012

Jeffrey S. Ankrom

Jeffrey S. Ankrom, (J.D., Maurer School of Law, Indiana University) is an attorney focusing on copyright, publishing law, and civil rights in the workplace. He has given numberous talks on legal issues and the arts, especially on copyright and contract issues for literary translators. As an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Biology at Indiana University, Ankrom teaches a course in the area of his principal research interest: the societal issues of biotechnology.

Mary Brydon-Miller

Mary Brydon-Miller, Ph.D., directs the University of Cincinnati's Action Research Center, in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is Professor of Educational Studies and Urban Educational Leadership in the College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services. Brydon-Miller is a participatory action researcher who engages in both community-based and educational action research. She is one of a number of writers for the Action Research Journal blog.

Brydon-Miller's current scholarship focuses on ethics and action research. Her recent publications in this area include "Ethics and Action Research: Deepening our Commitment to Principles of Social Justice and Redefining Systems of Democratic Practice" in the Handbook of Action Research (2nd ed.) and "Covenantal Ethics and Action Research: Exploring a Common Foundation for Social Research" in the Handbook of Social Research Ethics. She also edited a special issue of the journal Action Research on the topic of research ethics with her colleagues Davydd Greenwood and Olav Eikeland and co-authored articles there with Greenwood on research ethics and institutional review boards and on ethical issues of intellectual property. Other publications include work on participatory action research methods, feminist theory and action research, refugee resettlement, elder advocacy, disability rights, and academic writing in the social sciences.

Brydon-Miller is also interested in arts-based action research and on addressing issues in higher education using an action research model. She teaches courses in action research, the theoretical foundations of urban educational leadership, academic writing, and research ethics.

Michael Davis

Michael Davis is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions and Professor of Philosophy, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. Before coming to IIT in 1986, he taught at Case-Western Reserve, Illinois State, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. For 1985-86, he held a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. Since 1991, he has held-among other grants-four from the National Science Foundation to integrate ethics into technical courses.

Davis has published more than 150 articles (and chapters) and authored seven books: To Make the Punishment Fit the Crime (Westview, 1992); Justice in the Shadow of Death (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Thinking Like an Engineer (Oxford, 1998); Ethics and the University (Routledge, 1999); Profession, Code, and Ethics (Ashgate, 2002); and Actual Social Contract and Political Obligation (Mellen, 2002); and also co-edited four other books: Ethics and the Legal Professions (Prometheus, 1986) and a second edition (Prometheus, 2009); AIDS: Crisis in Professional Ethics (Temple, 1994); and Conflict of Interest in the Professions (Oxford, 2001) and edited one other, Engineering Ethics (Ashgate, 2005). He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1972.

Peter Dunn

Peter E. Dunn is Associate Vice President for Research and Professor of Entomology at Purdue University. Dr. Dunn received the B.S. in Chemistry (1968) from Fordham University in The Bronx, N.Y., and Ph.D. in Biochemistry (1973) from Purdue University. He completed postdoctoral study in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Chicago (1974-1977) prior to joining Purdue's Department of Entomology in 1977. Dr. Dunn's research was in the area of comparative immunology. His laboratory studied the immune responses of insects to bacterial pathogens and a hymenopteneran (braconid wasp) endoparasitoid.

Except for a brief return to full time teaching and research from 2001-2003, Dr. Dunn has served as Assistant, and then, Associate Vice President for Research at Purdue from 1995-present. In these administrative roles, he serves as Purdue's Research Integrity Officer, Institutional Official for human subjects' protection and vertebrate animal welfare, Responsible Official for Research-Related Conflicts of Interest, and Export Control Officer. Dr. Dunn teaches graduate courses in the Responsible Conduct of Research (GRAD 61200) and Insect Physiology and Biochemistry (ENTM 55100). Dr. Dunn is a two-time alumnus of the Teaching Research Ethics Workshop.

Julie Hollowell

Julie Hollowell (Ph.D. Indiana University 2004) is a cultural anthropologist who helped establish IU's innovative Ph.D. track in Archaeology and Social Context. From 2008-10 she was the Nancy Schaenen Visiting Scholar at the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics and Visiting Professor of Anthropology at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Her interests focus on multiple claims on the material and intellectual past; the ethics of social science research (archaeology and cultural heritage studies in particular); and the repatriation of knowledge, materials, and research directives to source communities. Hollowell has been Killam Fellow at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver) and is a Research Associate with the Center for Archaeology in the Public Interest (based in IU's Department of Anthropology). She also holds an MS in Education and taught for a decade at Harmony School in Bloomington, Indiana. For four summers she served as crew chief for archaeological excavations conducted in the Inupiat village of Wales (pop. 130), the northwesternmost point of the Americas.

Hollowell is known for her ethnographic case study approach to understanding the antiquities market and other topics in archaeological ethics. In 2003, she co-edited a major text, Ethical Issues in Archaeology with Larry Zimmerman and Karen Vitelli. Her chapter, "Moral Arguments on Subsistence Digging," in The Ethics of Archaeology: Philosophical Perspectives on the Practice of Archaeology (edited by G. Scarre and C. Scarre, Cambridge University Press, 2006) shows how this work integrates ethics and archaeology to inform research.

Hollowell helped initiate the Society for American Archaeology's annual Ethics Bowl. She co-authored Ethics in Action: Case Studies in Archaeological Dilemmas (with Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Dru McGill, SAA Press 2008), designed to promote ethics education at the university level and beyond. She is co-editor (with George Nicholas) of Research Handbooks in Archaeology (published by Left Coast Press), a series of comprehensive volumes covering various archaeological subfields, distinctively global in scope and with a strong emphasis on research ethics. Hollowell is also a co-investigator on an international project on Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage: Theory, Practice, Policy and Ethics, directed by Dr. George Nicholas (Simon Fraser University) that was funded by Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council.

Eric M. Meslin

Eric Meslin, Ph.D., is Founding Director of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics; Associate Dean for Bioethics and Professor of Medicine, Medical and Molecular Genetics, Public Health and Philosophy.

He came to Indiana University in July 2001 from the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), where he had been Executive Director since 1998. NBAC was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1995, and was charged with advising the White House and the federal government on a range of bioethics issues including cloning, stem cell research, international clinical trials, and genetics studies. Prior to his work at NBAC, Meslin was Program Director in the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) program at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

A Canadian by birth, Meslin received his B.A. in Philosophy from York University (Toronto), and both his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Bioethics Program in Philosophy at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Meslin has held academic positions at the University of Toronto (1988-96) and at Oxford University (1994-95).

He has more than 140 articles and book chapters on topics ranging from international health research to science policy. Meslin sits on serveral board and committees including the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Ethical and Scientifica Issues in Studying the Safety of Approved Drugs; the Stem Cell Oversight Committee of Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation; Indiana Public Umbilical Cord Blood Bank (Appointed by Governor Mitch Daniels); and the Board of Directors of Genome Canada. On May 9, 2007 he was appointed a Chevalier de L'Order Nationale du Merite (Knight of the National Order of Merit) by the President of France.

Richard Miller

Richard Miller is the Director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions and Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. His research interests focus on issues in the ethics of war and peace; practical reasoning in public life; and medical ethics, with special attention to children. Miller teaches courses on religion and public life; the ethics of war and peace; biomedical ethics; religion, justice and culture; and religion and the self. Miller is the author of Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition (1991); Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning (1996); Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine (2003); Terror, Religion, and Liberal Thought (2010), along with numerous articles and book chapters on the ethics of humanitarian intervention, civic virtue, multiculturalism, and religion and public intellectuals.

Kenneth D. Pimple

Ken Pimple is Director of Teaching Research Ethics Programs at the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions and Senior Advisor for the Ethics CORE of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics . He has more than twenty years of experience in organizing faculty workshops on ethics and research ethics.

Pimple has directed the Teaching Research Ethics workshop (TRE) since 1993. He also directed Scientists and Subjects: An Online Seminar on the Ethics of Research with Human Subjects, an annual seminar funded by the National Institutes of Health, from 1999-2006.

In 2009 Pimple received a grant from the National Science Foundation to lead a project on Ethical Guidance for Research and Application of Pervasive and Autonomous Information Technology (PAIT). He has authored or co-authored successful grant proposals totaling more than $1.3 million. Other funders have included the National Institutes of Health; the United States Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE); the Open Society Institute; and the Lilly Endowment.

He has published numerous articles on research ethics and edited an anthology of previously-published articles (Research Ethics, Ashgate Publishing, 2009). He has been invited to make presentations on the responsible conduct of research and on teaching research ethics in a wide variety of venues, including the national meetings of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R); the Whitaker Foundation; and the Association for Moral Education; and at special workshops or seminars at universities and research institutions in the U.S. and abroad. His vita and many of his papers can be viewed at http://mypage.iu.edu/~pimple and his two blogs can be found at Ethical PAIT and National Ethics Center.

Suresh Viswanathan

Suresh Viswanathan teaches in the Indiana University School of Optometry.

Stuart Yoak

Stuart Yoak is the Executive Director of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, an international organization for those who teach and work in the areas of practical and professional ethics.