Abdullah Adlan is chairman of the National Committee of Healthcare Ethics, Saudi Health Council, Saudi Arabia. He has more than 20 years of leadership and research experience, along with two PhDs. He served as the first employee in what became a multibillion SAR research entity in the King Abdullah International Medical Research Center, and in 2018, he was a co-founder of the Saudi National Institute of Health.
Mohammad Asim Beg is a professor in the Department of Pathology and Microbiology, Aga Khan University, Pakistan. He graduated in 1985 from Nishter Medical College Hospital, Multan, Pakistan with an MBBS. In 1993 he obtained his PhD from the Department of Biological Sciences, Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Salford, and received his Fellowship from the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh in 2011. In September 1997 he joined the Department of Pathology and Microbiology at Aga Khan University as a senior instructor and became a professor in 2013. He is also a Consultant Parasitologist at AKUH. At the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, he teaches parasitology to undergraduate and postgraduate students, and has been the backbone of parasitic diagnostics in the CAP and JCIA accredited Clinical Laboratory. He has had several PhD students under his supervision and has done extensive research on malaria and parasitic diseases in Pakistan. Asim was former Chair of the Aga University Hospital Ethics Committee and has been an invited speaker both nationally and internationally. He has received many internal and external grants and has around 85 publications, the majority of which are international, to his credit.
Miriam Ethel Bentwich, PhD, is a senior lecturer of bioethics at the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, with a rich background in political philosophy, along with a proven expertise in empirical ethics and normative philosophically based ethics. She also leads the Medical Ethics & Humanities programme at the Faculty of Medicine and was responsible for its unique and innovative design as well as its successful application. Miriam is engaged with a broad range of issues in biomedical ethics and medical humanities, and her publications in leading academic journals include varied topics such as coping and evasive strategies in small group learning of medical ethics; teaching art as a source for enhancement of empathy and tolerance to ambiguity among medical students; perceptions of multicultural caregivers on human dignity and autonomy of patients with dementia; physicians’ perspectives on enemy patients; vulnerability, integrity and undermining the justification for funding of in vitro fertilisation; and reprogenetics, reproductive risks and cultural awareness. She has published a book (Reclaiming Liberty; Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and articles in leading academic journals (Nature Biotechnology, American Journal of Bioethics, American Journal of Public Health, Ethnicity and Health, Journal of Medical Ethics, Nursing Ethics, BMC Medical Education, etc.). Her research in end-of-life (EOL) care spans from regulatory facets of EOL to perceptions and coping mechanisms of multicultural caregivers attending to patients with dementia, as well as perceptions of multicultural nurses and physicians regarding dying patients in Israel.
Tracey Evans Chan is an associate professor in the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore (NUS), specialising in biomedical law and ethics. He has published in the field both locally and internationally, and served in a number of Singapore expert committees on matters such as surrogacy, transplant ethics, human-animal combinations in biomedical research and mitochondrial germline modification. His recent publications include an article on Singapore’s advance care planning initiatives, which appeared in the Journal of Law & Medicine (2019). Professionally, he was called to the Singapore Bar in 1998 and then spent two years clerking for the Supreme Court of Singapore before joining academia. He concluded a year-long secondment to the Singapore Ministry of Health as a deputy director in the Regulatory Policy and Legislation Division in 2015, where he assisted in the policy work on the Human Biomedical Research Act 2015. He is also a member of the NUS Institutional Review Board.
Bo Chen is currently an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law, Macau University of Science and Technology and an adjunct lecturer at the Centre for Disability Law and Policy, National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway. He holds a PhD in law from NUI Galway. Before that, he worked with a China-based public interest law institute that advocates for the rights of persons with mental health issues. His research interests include China’s mental health and capacity law, disability law and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Daisy Cheung is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law and deputy director of the Centre for Medical Ethics & Law at the University of Hong Kong. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Amherst College, her Bachelor of Laws (Hons) and Postgraduate Certificate in Laws from the University of Hong Kong and her Bachelor of Civil Law from the University of Oxford. Daisy’s research focuses on mental health and capacity law. Her work includes analyses on a number of issues related to Hong Kong’s Mental Health Ordinance (MHO), with a focus on the problematic way in which mental capacity is conceived of and assessed in different contexts. She has written on public mental health ethics in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has researched mental capacity law and ethics across several contexts, including her funded research on adult guardianship regimes, an ongoing project on the implications of novel neurointerventions on mental capacity law and ethics and an upcoming funded project on best interests determinations.
Leonardo D. De Castro is a professorial lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, University of the Philippines Diliman; chair of the Philippine Health Research Ethics Board, the national policymaking body for human research protection; and sits on the National Ethics Committee. When he was vice chairman of the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee, he served on the drafting team for the International Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. As member of the UNESCO Advisory Expert Committee for the Teaching of Ethics, he contributed to the development of a Core Curriculum on Bioethics for the agency’s Ethics Teacher Training Course (ETTC). In addition to being lecturer for the ETTC, he has participated in UNESCO’s programme to provide orientation and training for National Bioethics Committees in resource-challenged countries. As a consultant to the European Commission he assisted in the formulation of national ethics guidelines for health research and conducted training workshops for members of national ethics committees. As a consultant to the World Health Organization (WHO) he contributed to the drafting of the WHO Guiding Principles on Human Cell, Tissue and Organ Transplantation. He was also on the drafting group for the Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and the declaration by the Asian Working Group Against Organ Trafficking. As president of the Asian Bioethics Association and as editor-in-chief of the Asian Bioethics Review, he supported the development of young Asian academics. He has done research on bioethics teaching and ethics in global health, healthcare worker migration, organ transplantation, research among indigenous populations and genetic discrimination. His awards include the Takashi Fujii Prize of the International Federation of Social Science Organizations, a National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle, an Outstanding Monograph Award from the National Academy of Science and Technology and several International Publication Awards from the University of the Philippines.
Kelly Amal Dhru is a research associate and PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She is a law graduate from Gujarat National Law University in India, and holds the degrees of Bachelor of Civil Law (Distinction) and Master of Philosophy in law with a focus on legal philosophy from University College, the University of Oxford. She was a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellow in Bioethics and Public Health Law, as a part of which she completed the Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School. Kelly is currently a PhD fellow at the AMBSL Graduate School of Law and Research Associate (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the University of Hamburg, where her PhD thesis focuses on connecting the debates around legal right-holding and legal personhood to the legal rights surrounding the emerging neurotechnologies, particularly concerning decisional and bodily autonomy. Kelly has taught in India, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and her research interests are bioethics, legal philosophy, and legal regulation. In a parallel universe, Kelly has been a theatre artist, and is a co-founder of Lawtoons (www.lawtoons.in), a series of comic books to educate children about laws and rights.
Michael Dunn is an associate professor at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, where he is also the director of undergraduate education, leading the health ethics, law and professional curriculum for medical students. Michael’s research focuses primarily on the ethical dimensions of community-based and long-term health and social care management, practice and law internationally. The other main area of his current work examines questions about the nature of bioethics, the value of empirical ethics research and methodological strategies for answering bioethical questions. He has authored more than 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in the fields of bioethics, medical law and health and social care services research. His two most recent books are Medical Ethics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Empirical Bioethics: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Before joining the National University of Singapore in 2022, Dunn was based at the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, for 13 years. He completed his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Cambridge and has held visiting teaching and research positions at universities and research centres in Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, Oslo, Amsterdam and Bradford.
Ravindra B. Ghooi is director of Scientia Clinical Services, India. He is a pharmacologist, with a doctorate from Bombay University and a postdoctorate from Max Planck Institute in Goettingen, Germany. He has spent over 30 years in drug discovery and development, conducting preclinical and clinical research and organising clinical trials and bioavailability and bioequivalence studies. Starting with preclinical research at Haffkine Institute and Max Planck, he shifted to the pharmaceutical industry as a medical advisor. After two decades he made a lateral shift to the clinical research industry. Ravindra was instrumental in setting up a contract research organisation (CRO), CliniRx, in which he headed the clinical operations. From the CRO, he moved to teaching clinical research and retired as professor of drug development and clinical research at the Symbiosis International University. Apart from his professional duties he is involved in social issues, patients’ rights and palliative care. In the 1990s, to ensure the supply of morphine to cancer patients, he challenged the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, which put morphine out of reach for even cancer patients. This long and difficult fight ended with the Indian Supreme Court amending the law in 2016. He has since been working with groups that have been trying to obtain legal sanction for euthanasia and advance directives in the country. He presently devotes his time to developing a culture of ethics in clinical research and guides ethics committees and research programmes in Pune. He also is involved in teaching ethics and regulations at local universities on a visiting basis. He has contributed to more than 65 research papers in national and international journals and contributed chapters to books on clinical research and related subjects. He heads a small consulting firm known as Scientia Clinical Services, in Pune, where he lives and works.
Asma Hamid is the founder and head of litigation at Asma Hamid Associates, Lahore, Pakistan. She received her LLM from Harvard Law School. Before her independent practice, she served as an equity partner in one of the largest law firms in Pakistan and as advocate general for the Province of Punjab – she holds the unique distinction of being the first woman in Pakistan’s history to hold this post. Asma regularly advises clients in corporate and commercial laws by reviewing, drafting and negotiating contracts, general advice, opinions, due diligence, structuring and leading complex and high-value transactions. She has carried out extensive work in the areas of public and private sector projects, tax laws, procurement laws, contracts, joint ventures, banking and finance laws, capital markets and securities laws, intellectual property laws, foreign investment, insurance laws, construction and real estate laws, employment and labour laws, and energy, water and environmental laws. Her extensive litigation portfolio includes representing individuals, multinationals and corporates before the Supreme Court, Federal Shariat Court, Lahore High Court, Islamabad High Court, Tribunals and governmental departments.
Erfan Hussain is a critical care consultant at Aga Khan University Hospital in Pakistan. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine in critical care medicine. He has over 30 years of critical care experience, holding the position of director of critical care medicine at the Northwell Manhasset Hospital in New York. After immigrating to Pakistan, he held the position of director of adult critical care at the Aga Khan University Hospital and Medical College in Pakistan. Having been a member of hospital ethics committees in the United States and in Karachi, he has 20 years of clinical ethical consultation experience. In addition, he has been co-chair of the Aga Khan University Hospital Ethics Committee. While in this position, he devised several policies covering issues such as brain death determination, do-not-resuscitate, end-of-life care and a surrogacy policy. Erfan is also a member of the Aga Khan Medical College Bioethics Committee and recently was a lead author of the hospital’s ventilator allocation policy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Erfan is also a visiting lecturer at the Center for Bioethics and Culture at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation.
Ghaiath Hussein is an assistant professor in medical ethics and law at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. A medical doctor and bioethicist, he earned a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, Canada, and a PhD in bioethics from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom,. He is the principal co-author of the Professionalism and Ethics Handbook for Residents (Saudi Commission for Health Specialties, 2015), the main training and medical licensing examination reference for medical ethics in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries. He has also contributed to other international training manuals, including the WHO’s Training Manual on Ethics in Epidemics, Emergencies and Disasters: Research, Surveillance and Patient Care (2015). For more than a decade, he has been teaching bioethics to medical students, interns, researchers, postgraduate trainees and public health practitioners. He has been helping medical schools and health institutions in Saudi Arabia establish bioethics departments, develop medical ethics curricula and set examination standards. Regionally, he has helped in developing and delivering the first public health ethics curriculum in the Middle East in collaboration with EMPHNET. His international expertise includes providing consultations and the membership of research ethics committees for such organisations as WHO, UNESCO and Médecins Sans Frontières.
Richard Huxtable is professor of medical ethics and law and director of the Centre for Ethics in Medicine in the Medical School at the University of Bristol. Qualified in law, sociolegal studies and bioethics, he conducts research primarily regarding end-of-life decision-making, surgical ethics and clinical ethics. He is principal investigator on a Wellcome Trust collaborative project, “Balancing Best Interests in Healthcare, Ethics and Law” (BABEL). In addition to numerous articles, he has authored or edited nine books, including Healthcare Ethics, Law and Professionalism (Routledge, 2018) and Law, Ethics and Compromise at the Limits of Life: To Treat or Not to Treat? (Routledge, 2012). Richard has served on various ethics committees, including those of the British Medical Association and the Royal College of General Practitioners, and he is chair of the UK Clinical Ethics Network. Richard tweets at @ProfRHuxtable.
Man Teng Iong is a senior instructor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Macau. He finished his LLB at the Faculty of Law, New University of Lisbon (Portugal) before completing his Masters of Law degree at the Faculty of Law, University of Macau, with a dissertation regarding advance directives in Macau. He is now a PhD student at the School of Law of University of Minho (Portugal) with a dissertation regarding medical liability and ethics. He worked as a legal advisor in the Macao Health Bureau for six years and gained legal experience about medical law issues. His area of interest embraces medical malpractice, patient’s safety, patient’s rights, human and fundamental rights and criminal law. He published papers about medical law and ethics in international journals, such as Medicine and Law and Biolaw Journal.
Futoshi Iwata is a professor of law at the Kanagawa University, Kanagawa, Japan. He was previously a law professor at Sophia University (Tokyo, Japan) (2000–20). He obtained a PhD from University of Tokyo Law and Political Science Department. He also obtained two master’s degrees at the University of Wisconsin Law School (MLI, 1992 and LLM, 1994). He was a research visitor at the Melbourne Law School (Australia) in 2004–5 (issues involving medical errors and the role of law) and at the University of Wisconsin Law School (United States) in 2013–4 as a Fulbright scholar (the ethical and legal issues pertaining to newborn screening). His research interests are mainly in two fields: (1) lay participation in criminal procedure and death penalty and (2) law and medicine, including medical errors, end of life, public health law and newborn screening. He has been a member of several committees at the Ministry of Health, the Ambulance Agency and the Ministry of Justice of Japan. Relating to advance directives, he was a member of the Ministry of Health committee for revising the Process Guidelines of the Decision-Making for the End-of-Life Medicine and Care in 2018.
Sharon Kaur is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Law at University of Malaya, Malaysia. She teaches medical law and ethics to both undergraduate and graduate students. Sharon’s research interests have primarily revolved around medical research ethics and issues of competency and consent. In 2017, she spent a year as a visiting research fellow with the CENTRES programme at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at National University of Singapore where she developed an interest in issues relating to global health ethics and the rights of marginalised populations.
Noshin Khan is an early childhood education and development consultant and freelance researcher in Pakistan with 18 years of experience in early childhood education (ECE) . She has a Master of Arts degree in early childhood studies and a Bachelor of Arts in ECE from Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. She is a registered member of the Ontario College of Early Childhood Educators. Noshin has taught early childhood educators in the diploma programme at Sheridan College Toronto and undergraduate ECE students at Ryerson University for several years. She has presented at several international conferences such as the Global Summit on Childhood and Comparative and International Education Society. Moreover, she has represented Pakistan at international forums where the importance of ECE has been at the fore. Noshin is a part of the Early Childhood Development Action Network and a member of its task force working on supporting efforts to invest in and build capacity of the early childhood development workforce to deliver high-quality services to children from birth through school entry. Most recent and notable representation was being part of a team selected by the WHO to develop global guidelines for physical activity, sedentary behaviour and screen time for children aged 0–5 years. Noshin has co-authored “Pediatric Perspectives on Diabetes Self-Care: A Process of Achieving Acceptance”, which was published in the Qualitative Health Research Academic Journal in 2015. Currently Noshin represents Pakistan at Childhood Education International and is working on projects with UNICEF in Balochistan, which involve primary and secondary research, data analysis, report writing and developing teacher education programmes.
Satoshi Kodama has a background in moral and political philosophy. He graduated from Kyoto University and is associate professor in the Department of Ethics in Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Letters. Formerly he held a lectureship at the Department of Biomedical Ethics in the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Medicine. His research interests include moral theory (utilitarianism), moral methodology (the role of intuition in moral reasoning), ethics and evolution, end-of-life issues, resource allocation and public health ethics. He has co-authored textbooks on biomedical ethics both in Japanese and English, and he has translated Albert Jonsen’s Clinical Ethics, Tony Hope’s Medical Ethics: A Very Short Introduction and Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save. His recent work includes Exploring Bioethics Through Manga: Questions of the Meaning of “Life” (Kodama, Satoshi and Natsutaka, 2018).
Ilhak Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences, Division of Medical Law and Ethics, Asian Institute for Bioethics and Health Law (AIBHL), Yonsei University Medical College (YUMC), South Korea. His major areas of research interest are end-of-life decision making, clinical ethics consultation, and ethical, legal and social implications studies in human genomics. He is trying to find a robust methodology in bioethics to guide practitioners and policymakers. This approach to bioethics aims to bridge the experiences of the local society with philosophical and theoretical ethics. He is also working on practical guidelines that help practitioners with difficult issues in end-of-life care decision-making. Ilhak currently serves as a director of the Division of Medical Law and Ethics, YUMC. He serves as a member of various ethical committees, as well as a member of national bioethics advisory committee expert groups. He is an active board member in many academic societies such as the Korean Association of Medical Ethics and the Korean Association of Medical Law.
Rebecca Lee is an associate professor at the Department of Law of the University of Hong Kong. She holds a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Hong Kong) and a Bachelor of Civil Law degree from the University of Oxford. She teaches and researches in equity and trusts, contracts and non-profit law. She is co-editor (with Lusina Ho) of Special Needs Financial Planning: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Her joint research project on special needs trust has led to the successful introduction of a trust scheme for individuals with cognitive impairment. Currently, she is working on research projects on selected issues in trusts law, charity governance and special needs support.
Richard Boon Leong Lim is a consultant palliative medicine physician and the head of palliative medicine in Hospital Selayang. He also serves as the National Head of Service for Palliative Medicine in the Ministry of Health Malaysia. He has been involved in the development of palliative medicine in Malaysia since 1998 and has worked constantly to improve the provision of palliative care and compassionate care within the Malaysian healthcare system. He developed the National Palliative Care Policy and Strategic Plan for Malaysia which was launched in 2019 and among the strategies to improve palliative care and good end-of-life care includes the promotion of advance care planning. He trains other doctors, nurses and paramedical personnel in various aspects of palliative care with a particular interest in ethics, communication skills and end-of-life care.
Alexander Atrio L. Lopez is an instructor in philosophy at the University of the Philippines Diliman. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy (summa cum laude). He also has a Bachelor’s degree in basic medical sciences from the University of the Philippines Manila.
Renato B. Manaloto is an assistant professor of philosophy, University of Philippines Diliman. He has a Master of Arts degree in philosophy and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of the Philippines in Diliman. He specialises in philosophy of law, phenomenology and existentialism, bioethics and research ethics. In 2005, he was an international fellow in bioethics and research ethics administration, a programme implemented jointly by the Western International Review Board, WHO and the University of Washington at Seattle.
Reina Ozeki-Hayashi is a visiting scholar in the Department of Biomedical Ethics in the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Medicine and an affiliate instructor in the Department of Bioethics and Humanities in the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, United States. She obtained an MD from Sapporo Medical University in 2001 and worked as a gastroenterologist and internist from 2001 to 2009. From 2009 to 2011, she pursued her career at the Department of Palliative Medicine, Tsukuba Medical Center Hospital, and obtained a Master of Public Health degree in 2012, and a PhD in social medicine in 2018 from the University of Tokyo. She was an assistant professor at the Department of Biomedical Ethics, the University of Tokyo from 2018 to 2021. She obtained a Master of Bioethics degree from Harvard University in 2022. Her research interests primarily include three fields: (1) medical decision-making process and communication at the end of life, (2) medical futility, and (3) teaching and training for medical professionals in managing moral distress. Ozeki-Hayashi translated into Japanese Lawrence J. Schneiderman and Nancy S. Jecker’s Wrong Medicine Doctors, Patients, and Futile Treatment (second edition) in 2021. She is a facilitator of the PEACE Project (Palliative care programme Emphasizing symptom management and Assessment for Continuous medical Education) and CST (Communication Skills Training programme for oncologists).
Alireza Parsapoor is an assistant professor in the Medical Ethics and History of Medicine Research Centre and Department of Medical Ethics, Tehran University of Medical Sciences. He holds an MD (1998), MPH (2008) and PhD in medical ethics (2014). His research interests include clinical ethics and patients’ rights. He is a member of several hospital clinical and research ethics committees and is also secretary of the National Committee of Clinical Ethics. He is a member of the National Committee of Ethics in Research of Iran and a member of the Board of Medical Ethics of Iran.
Vera Lúcia Raposo is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law of Coimbra University, Portugal and a part-time contributor to the Centre for Medical Ethics and Law, University of Hong Kong. In the past, she was a lecturer at the University of Macau (where she was associate professor) and of-counsel at the law firm Vieira de Almeida e Associados, in Lisbon, in the departments of health law and privacy law. She is a frequent speaker in academic events worldwide and a member of the editorial board of the European Journal of Health Law. She is the author of several studies in Portuguese, English and Spanish (some translated into Chinese), particularly on biomedical law (medical liability, patient safety, gene editing and reproductive issues) and new digital technologies (artificial intelligence, digital governance, data protection).
Ehsan Shamsi-Gooshki is an assistant professor of Medical Ethics at Tehran University of Medical Sciences. He graduated as a physician in 2005 and was enrolled in the first PhD programme of medical ethics in Iran in 2009. Until his graduation in 2013, he was involved in several research projects, teaching medical ethics to undergraduate and graduate students, lecturing in a number of national and international workshops/conferences, participating in the UNESCO Ethics Teachers Training Course, interning in the department of ethics at the World Health Organization in Geneva, and visiting as a research fellow at the Institute of Biomedical Ethics, University of Zurich and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, Washington DC simultaneously. At the Tehran University of Medical Sciences, he applies ethical standards in practice as the director of the National Committee for Ethics in Biomedical Research at the Ministry of Health and Medical Education, the senior advisor and secretary of the Medical Ethics Committee at the Iran Medical Council and the secretary of the Medical Ethics Group at the Iran Academy of Medical Sciences. Since 2018, the UNESCO Director General has assigned him as one of the 36 members of the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee. Ehsan has published a number of research articles and book chapters both in English and Persian. His most prominent works include the (1) development of the Code of Ethics for the Iran Medical Council, which has been released recently as an official guideline that Iranian medical professionals are required to consider in their practice and (2) establishment of a national online accreditation system for research ethics committees and a national repository for the committees’ approved research projects.
Zain Abbas Syed is a research associate at the ETHOX Centre, University of Oxford, and internal medicine trainee, North-West London Deanery. He graduated in 2013 with a first-class bachelor of arts (Hons) in medical sciences from Christ Church College at the University of Oxford. With the support of Oxford, he then took a gap-study period between 2013 and 2016 and travelled to the Holy City of Qom in the Islamic Republic of Iran to study towards a bachelor of arts degree in Islamic jurisprudence and belief at Qom Seminary. His thesis collates and analyses the opinions of contemporary Shia jurists on the issue of brain death. He returned to Oxford in 2016 to complete his medical degree and successfully graduated with a bachelor of medicine/bachelor of surgery degree in 2019. Zain was then accepted on a highly competitive Academic Foundation Programme at the University of Oxford to, alongside his clinical training, further his research in Islamic medical ethics and law. His current projects include A Comparison between Shia Islamic Law and United Kingdom Law on the Issue of Abortion; Advance Directives and End of Life Decision Making in Muslim Countries and Islamic Law; A Critical Analysis of the Issue of Brain Death according to current Shia Islamic Jurists; and A Pragmatic, Multidisciplinary, Evidence-based approach to Al-Istiftā’ on the Issue of Organ Donation after Death. In the future, Zain hopes to pursue an integrated clinical academic pathway in internal medicine, further his Islamic seminary studies and develop his research interest in Islamic law and its application to medical ethics.
Miho Tanaka is a senior researcher at the Japan Medical Association Research Institute (JMARI), where she has worked since 2013. She received a Master of Public Health degree from the Graduate School of Medicine at the University of Tokyo in 2012. She is also a PhD student at the Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Ritsumeikan University. Her research interests include the ethical, legal and social issues around end-of-life care in Japan, other Asian countries and countries in the West, including Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Currently, Tanaka is also interested in the ethical, legal and social issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, such as quarantine; allocation of scarce resources; social isolation; discrimination against disabled people, older people, infected people, and healthcare providers; advance care planning; decision-making in end-of-life care; etc. She has published several articles about ethical issues in end-of-life care in BMC Medical Ethics, Asian Bioethics Review, Journal of the Japan Association for Bioethics and Journal of Patient Safety and Conflict Management. She also recently published an academic book, Choices at the End of Life: Considering End-of-Life Care in Japanese (Keiso Shobo, 2017) in collaboration with her colleagues. Miho has joined the international collaborative research group, International Joint Research on Ethical and Legal Issues of End-of-Life Care in East Asia (https://en.asian-eolc-ethics.com/). Additionally, she was involved in the research project End of Life Care in the United Kingdom and Japan – Intersections in Culture, Practice and Policy led by the University of Glasgow (www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/endoflifestudies/projects/the-mitori-project/).
Thitinant Tengaumnuay has been a law lecturer at the Faculty of Law, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, since 2014. She received her LLB (First-Class Honours) from Chulalongkorn University before continuing her masters of law at the University of Oxford where she studied medical law and ethics and another LLM in environmental law at New York University. She has recently completed a PhD at the University of Bristol, in the area of environmental law and regulation. Her areas of interest include medical law, criminal law and environmental law.
Daniel Fu-Chang Tsai (MD, PhD) is the founding professor of the Department & Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Bioethics in the College of Medicine and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at National Taiwan University (NTU) and is jointly appointed in the Department of Family Medicine, the Institute of Medical Device and Imaging, and the Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine. He is also an attending physician in the Department of Medical Research at NTU Hospital and served as the chairman of the Research Ethics Committee. Daniel is a family physician and bioethicist. He graduated from NTU College of Medicine in 1989 and received family medicine resident training at NTU Hospital. He earned his PhD in bioethics from the University of Manchester in 1999 and has been working in bioethics, clinical ethics and research ethics since. He was formerly head of the Department of Social Medicine. He has been in charge of many national projects commissioned by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and the Ministry of Science and Technology. He has publications in Journal of Medical Ethics, Hastings Center Report, American Journal of Bioethics, among others and also published 20 books and 15 book chapters on various topics in bioethics. He is on the editorial board of many medical/bioethics journals. He served as vice president of the International Association of Bioethics in 2016–7 and president of the Taiwan Association of Institutional Review Boards in 2018–21. He is a member of the Merck Ethics Advisory Panel and was awarded honorary membership by the UNESCO Chair of Bioethics in 2015, the Goldman-Berland Lectureship in Palliative Medicine in 2019 and Hastings Center Fellow in 2021.
Yesim Isil Ulman is a professor of medical history and ethics at Acibadem University School of Medicine, Istanbul, Turkey. She became associate professor in 2005 and has been full professor since 2013. She has studied humanities, political science, history of medicine and ethics. Her MA, MSc and PhD were on the history of modernisation in science and medicine (1986–99). She chaired and contributed to the studies and works of the Turkish Bioethics Association (2006–12); and coordinated in the Training Programme of Health Law Certificate for Acibadem Univ. Continued Education (ASEGEM) (2010–4). She served as vice-chair of the University Research Ethics Committee (2009–14) and a member of the Hospital Ethics Committee (2009–present) and Animal Experiments Ethics Committee (2012–present). She is on the editorial board of Acibadem University Health Sciences Journal. She was invited to establish the Turkey Working Group of the Cambridge Consortium of Bioethics Education (2013) in collaboration with a multidisciplinary team. She is an internationally certified trainer of Moral Case Deliberation, an innovative and dialogical approach to teaching ethics and ethics consultation developed by the Amsterdam UMC Medical Humanities. She has contributed to the Horizon VIRT2UE Research Integrity Project as a stakeholder and co-trainer. She initiated the Acibadem University Bioethics Master of Science Programme and was acting director of the Acibadem University Institute of Social Sciences. She serves as referee for European Union Cost Projects and reporter to the Council of Europe Bioethics Committee (DH-BIO). She is the delegate of Turkey at the International Society for the History of Medicine. She has collaborated on numerous international and local research projects on vulnerable groups, gender-based violence, main issues of bioethics, emerging technologies and teaching bioethics. Her latest research projects are on the ethical aspects of Artificial Intelligence in medicine and healthcare and End-of-Life Decision-making and Living Wills.
Thomas Tan Hooi Wang graduated from the Faculty of Law, University of Malaya in 2020. Currently, he is pursuing a master’s degree in commercial law at the same university. During his undergraduate studies, he was the director of University of Malaysia’s Consti Team, a student body that aims to raise the constitutional law literacy of the public. He was also very active in volunteering, running a community service project for two years alongside his friends at the residential college level.
Muhammad Atif Waqar is an assistant professor and founding chief of palliative medicine, Department of Oncology, Aga Khan University, Pakistan. He completed his residency training in internal medicine at the Brooklyn Hospital Center (an affiliate of the Weil-Cornell Medical School) in New York. He then pursued two successive fellowships in hospice/palliative medicine and geriatric medicine at the University of Nevada School of Medicine in Reno. Muhammad is board certified in internal medicine, hospice/palliative medicine and geriatric medicine with the American Board of Internal Medicine and its subspecialties. He served as a consultant in palliative medicine at the VA Sierra Nevada Healthcare System in Reno. There, he was also appointed as the medical director for the Home Based Palliative Care services. Muhammad has a strong interest in medical education and has previously served as a clinical assistant professor and associate programme director for the fellowship programme in palliative medicine at his alma mater, the University of Nevada School of Medicine. He has extensive experience in the areas of long-term care, home-based medical care and palliative and end-of-life care. Realising the dire need for palliative care services in Pakistan, he relocated to Pakistan to begin setting up the city’s first multidisciplinary palliative care service at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Karachi. Under his leadership and vision, the palliative care programme has grown exponentially to now include inpatient palliative care consultations throughout the hospital, as well as admissions to the palliative care service for inpatient end-of-life care as well as intractable symptom management. To address the community-based palliative care needs, his department is now offering daily outpatient palliative care clinics. Drawing from his extensive experience in the realm of non-institutional long-term care, Muhammad helped set up an extensive network of multidisciplinary home-based palliative care services in Karachi, the first of its kind in Pakistan.
Jenny Ka Yan Yau is a juris doctor candidate and research assistant at the University of Hong Kong. She has a degree in English and comparative literature from the University of St Andrews. She has extensive experience working with global nongovernmental organisations and charities, and her main areas of interest in law are LGBTQ+ rights and disability rights.