UC San Diego Sociologist Named Hastings Center Fellow

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John Evans, professor of sociology, Tata Chancellor’s Chair in Social Sciences and associate dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of California San Diego, has been elected a fellow of the Hastings Center, which is the honorific society for the field of bioethics.  The Hastings Center is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute focused on ethical issues in health, science and technology.

The newest fellows, a Hastings Center announcement said, 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, climate change, and pain and addiction.

Hastings fellows number more than 200 and include individuals who have made their mark in numerous subfields in bioethics. Their work has informed scholarship and public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, science and technology. Among them are scholars, scientists, journalists, lawyers, writers and artists.

“Being elected a Hastings Center fellow is a career-defining honor, something I have thought about since I was a grad student in the mid-1990s,” Evans said. “I am grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with a highly accomplished group of people who share my interest in shaping the field of bioethics.”

Evans is a nationally and internationally renowned expert on the ethics of science and technology, particularly on the ethics of human gene editing. He has dedicated his career to research on a number of overlapping areas, all of which concern the foundational humanistic questions behind scientific and technological development.

Following his research interests, Evans serves as co-director of the Institute for Practical Ethics, an interdisciplinary research unit in the UC San Diego School of Arts and Humanities dedicated to the goal of creating socially responsible science and policy and the study of important ethical issues arising from rapid advances in technology.

Evans is the author of more than 60 articles and book chapters on religion, culture, politics and science. He has written seven books including “The Human Gene Editing Debate,” the “The History and Future of Bioethics,” and most recently, “Disembodied Brains: Understanding our Intuitions on Neuro-Chimeras and Human-Brain Organoids". He has been a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and has held visiting professorial fellowships or honorary professorships at the universities of Edinburgh, Muenster, Ben Gurion and Queensland. He has also been elected to two other honorific societies: the International Society for Science and Religion and the Sociological Research Association.