Full-time Clinical Ethics Fellowship

The Full-time Clinical Ethics Fellowship at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics offers an intensive, immersive year-long experience in clinical medical ethics, ethics consultation, and empirical ethics research. The program is designed for those hoping to make clinical ethics a major focus of their professional lives. Fellows will be fully immersed in the activities of the MacLean Center, engaging in ongoing mentored clinical ethics research with faculty, regularly rounding in hospital units to facilitate interactions between clinicians and ethics consultants, and participating in ethics consultations with faculty supervision. The program begins with a four-to-five-week full-time Summer Intensive Clinical Ethics Course in July, where fellows attend 3-4 seminars daily covering foundational areas including clinical ethics consultations, pediatric ethics, surgical ethics, reproductive ethics, health equity, transplantation ethics, and other topics. Following the intensive, fellows engage in supervised ethics consultations and rounding on inpatient hospital units while participating in mentored clinical ethics research, which could be quantitative empirical bioethics or analytic explorations of critical clinical ethics topics. From September to June, fellows formally meet one day per week on Wednesdays for a structured ethics curriculum including Topics in Clinical Medical Ethics, Introduction to Moral Philosophy, and Research-in-Progress seminars. There is also the possibility of extending the fellowship to a second year. The fellowship welcomes applicants from any perspective including medicine, philosophy, nursing, and the social sciences. Fellows receive a salary and benefits commensurate with University of Chicago fellowship standards.