Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics focuses its attention on bios or life, and the ways we have helped, broken and abused it. Our teaching and research program is broader than most bioethics programs, and includes not only biomedical ethics but also environmental ethics, animal ethics, the ethics of scientific research, business and professional ethics, and ethics issues relating to new technologies.

Our in-person bioethics summer program is an unrivaled opportunity for professionals as well as college and graduate students to gain exposure to a broad range of bioethics issues; a typical year’s cohort draws students from over 20 countries around the world, as well as from over a dozen American colleges and universities.  Participants have the opportunity to engage in a research project and present it to faculty at the end of the program.

Our term-time study groups and lecture series cover a broad range of topics and regularly bring world-class speakers to the Yale and New Haven communities. We have continuing interests in questions of health policy, technology, animal ethics, and infant abandonment/pregnancies in crisis.

Our affiliates have served on a number of public commissions, including Connecticut’s Stem Cell Research Advisory Board, and state planning committees on Tissue Banking and on Public Health Preparedness. We are also involved with the work of Yale-New Haven Hospital’s ethics committees and Yale University’s IRBs, chairing many these committees over time.

We are a Center within the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. The Center has enjoyed additional support, in the past, from the Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Foundation, PepsiCo, the Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Center for Humans and Nature, the New Haven Community Foundation, Jerome Medalie, the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute on Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the Fogarty International Center, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families, the British Arts and Humanities Council, and several anonymous donors.

Welcome to our website! We hope you take some time to discover ways to participate in our programs. 

Lori Bruce, Doctorate in Bioethics (DBE), MA, MBE, HEC-C
Director, Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics 
Research Scientist, Institution for Social and Policy Studies
Yale University