Rebecca Kukla

Senior Research Scholar, Professor of Philosophy

Georgetown University

Dr. Kukla is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics.Dr. Kukla’s research interests within practical ethics include reproductive ethics and the culture of pregnancy and motherhood, public health ethics, the ethics of health communication, research ethics, methodological issues in medical research, and the social epistemology of medicine. Much of her research bridges bioethics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Of late, she has particularly been interested in ethical and epistemological issues surrounding risk reasoning and communication. She explores these issues at all levels of medical practice, from trial design and the interpretation of scientific results, to evidence-based medicine guidelines, to physician-patient communication, to health promotion campaigns and media representations of risk, to laypeople’s judgments and discussions about risk.Rebecca is the Editor-in-Chief of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal and Public Affairs Quarterly. She is also the former co-coordinator of the Feminist Approaches to Bioethics Network. She is the author or editor of several books and numerous articles, and has been an invited speaker at approximately 100 universities.She received her B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1990 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 1996. From 2003-2005, she was a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at The Johns Hopkins University. In the summer of 2004, she was a Visiting Scholar at the USDA, studying ethical issues concerning food and nutrition assistance programs. She also received her Sommelier certification from Algonquin College in 2007.