The John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame has released its sixth annual list of emerging ethical dilemmas and policy issues in science and technology. The annual list is designed to get people thinking about the ethics of potentially controversial technology, but the 2018 list shows that many of these issues are already here. See the list at reillytop10.com Read More

The death of local doctor Todd Graham over the summer spurred South Bend’s doctors, law enforcement officials, politicians, and prosecutors to form the Michiana Opioid Task Force. Both Jessica Baron and Anna Geltzer sit on the task force’s Primary Prevention Committee as well as its Executive Committee. Read More

Notre Dame’s John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values and Aeon Magazine have formed a new strategic partnership that will allow Center faculty, staff, students, and alumni/ae to reach Aeon's global audience of over one million unique users per month. Aeon is a non-profit open access magazine that encourages republication of its shorter articles under a Creative Commons license. They publish pieces on philosophy, science, psychology, health, society, technology, and culture and were founded in London in 2012 by Paul and Brigid Hains. It has offices in London, Melbourne and New York.  Read More

The Reilly Center's Science, Technology, and Values minor will offer a new course to undergraduate students on the ethics of emerging technologies this Fall.

Man and Machine: Humanity, Technology, and the Future (STV 10089 (CRN 21118)) will be offered for the first time this Fall on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:05pm to 6:20pm, in a location TBD. Read More

GLOBES fellow Salvatore Curasi, a second year biology graduate student, has received both a Fulbright U.S. Student Program Research Award and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) award. Sal studies the impact of climate change on vegetation and carbon storage in Arctic tundra. He is advised by Dr. Adrian Rocha of Biological Sciences. Read More

The American Council of Learned Societies has named Evan Ragland, Assistant Professor of History and HPS a 2017 ACLS Fellow. The set of 71 fellows was selected through ACLS’s rigorous, multi-stage peer-review process from a pool of nearly 1,200 applicants—one of the largest in the history of the program. The fellowships support scholars for six to twelve months of full-time research and writing.
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Prof. Janet Kourany (Philosophy, HPS) has been selected as the second recipient of the Gender Studies Program’s Marian Mullin Hancock Teaching Award.  

"Dr. Kourany’s students described her as a “generous and dedicated mentor” who expresses a genuine interest in her students and cares for them “both in the classroom and outside of it.” Students wrote that her classes – on topics of feminist philosophy of science and feminist epistemology, as well as the philosophy of gender and sexual difference itself – were “extremely unique, captivating, and well thought out.” She is one of the “strongest and most innovative teachers” in her department.  Her former students also noted how challenging Dr. Kourany's courses are. One student described the specific approach that they felt made Dr. Kourany such a phenomenal professor:  “We never knew the nature of her philosophical commitments. She constantly assumed a contrary position to serve the foil for one’s claim, which shifted the focus away from trying to provide the ‘right’ answer and toward a more comprehensive understanding of one’s own argument.”  Read More

Distinguished mathematical logician Luis Laita, the first person to receive a doctorate from the University of Notre Dame with training in the history and philosophy of science, died on February 24 after a distinguished career teaching artificial intelligence in his native Spain. As a Ph.D. student at Notre Dame, Laita studied for a period in the Department of Philosophy with prominent logician Boleslaw Sobocinski before transferring to the Department of History to focus on the history of mathematics. His 1976 dissertation, A Study of the Genesis of Boolean Logic, was directed by Michael Crowe, who is the the Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., Professor Emeritus of the Humanities in the Program of Liberal Studies and Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science. Read More

GLOBES students Becca Love and Quirine ten Bosch are part of a new vanguard of Ph.D. recipients armed with cross-cutting training and a deep knowledge of life science to enable them to understand and battle infectious disease in the developing world. Both students recently earned Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Biological Sciences as well as GLOBES Certificates in Environment and Society for their creative and integrative research. Read More

The John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values is hosting a multidisciplinary group of ethics scholars from around the country for a 2-day workshop on "positive research integrity." The field is a new and expanding approach to research ethics and integrity training and the Reilly Center's resulting white paper will be one of the first publications defining it and making recommendations for its implementation in academia, industry, and government. Read More