2022 Greenwall Foundation Year in Review

As we sat down to write the December edition of the Greenwall News, it struck us: what a year it’s been at The Greenwall Foundation!

The Foundation moved its principal office to Washington, DC at the beginning of this year. That move aligned well with our second big announcement of 2022: the launch of two new Foundation strategic priorities. One of these priorities is “increasing bioethics’ impact on policymaking,” and there’s no place better to do that than here in the nation’s capital.

The other is “shaping and supporting a broad, inclusive bioethics.” As we wrote on our blog in March, our current moment demands that we “invit[e] and welcom[e] into bioethics those who have otherwise been excluded or might not self-identify with the field.” These two priorities will guide the work of the Foundation moving forward.

One example is our support for a special issue of The Hastings Center Report, A Critical Moment in Bioethics: Reckoning with Anti-Black Racism through Intergenerational Dialogue. As Foundation President & CEO Michelle Groman said on our blog, the special report “[highlights] the critical role bioethics must play in efforts to address anti-Black racism. We’re proud to support and amplify [the authors’] work as they equip and inspire the field to move forward thoughtfully and purposefully,”

In July, the Foundation launched its first major grant initiative since 2013, Bridging Bioethics Research & Policymaking. This initiative, whose first grantees were announced in October, aims to “fund projects that develop novel mechanisms—or seek to adapt or improve existing mechanisms—that bring bioethics to the table as policy is made.”

That same month, we announced the celebration of the 20^th anniversary of the Foundation’s flagship Faculty Scholars Program. To commemorate the occasion, we hosted a special panel, “Restoring Trust in the FDA,” featuring four members of the Faculty Scholars Program community and moderated by STAT’s Adam Feuerstein. To cap off the celebration, we debuted a new video honoring the program, its history, and the Scholars themselves.

September brought the Foundation’s inaugural Bernard Lo, MD Award in Bioethics, which will be given annually in recognition of one specific area of accomplishment in bioethics. This year, the award celebrated excellence in bioethics mentorship. Its first recipient was Stanford professor Mildred Cho, PhD, a scholar who “has focused broadly on supporting and mentoring women and people of color throughout her career.”

Finally, in November, we held the sixth William C. Stubing Memorial Lecture, in honor of the Foundation’s former President who guided Greenwall to its current focus on bioethics. “Are Robots Racist? Rethinking Automation and Inequity in Healthcare,” a moderated conversation between Ruha Benjamin, PhD, and Meghna Chakrabarti, was the first Stubing Lecture to be held both in person and webcast live, reaching an audience well into the hundreds with a riveting conversation about the future of automation in healthcare.

And, amid all that was new in 2022, we continued our core grant programs, announcing three Faculty Scholars and a full slate of Making a Difference grants. Matthew McCoy, PhD, Wangui Muigai, PhD, and Joel Michael Reynolds, PhD, who you can read more about on our blog, comprise the Faculty Scholars Program Class of 2025. Our new Making a Difference grants (five in the Spring and three in the Fall) will fund innovative bioethics research with a real-world, practical impact.

As the year winds down, we at the Foundation cannot thank you enough for everything you’ve done to support our vision of making bioethics integral to decisions in health care, policy, and research. Your research, your innovative thinking, your event attendance, your engagement—emails, clicks, retweets, newsletter-opens—all these and more help us equip decision-makers in these spaces with the best, most rigorous ethics thinking available.

Thank you, and we can’t wait to see what’s in store for 2023!