The Hofstra Bioethics Center is directed by Professor Janet Dolgin and Dr. Samuel Packer. The interdisciplinary team of participating faculty includes those from Hofstra’s law, medical, and business schools, as well as others from the School of Education, Health and Human Services, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Statement of Mission and Goals
The mission of the Hofstra University Bioethics Center, a collaboration of Hofstra's law and medical schools, is to strengthen the humanistic delivery of health care and legal advocacy. In order to do so, two great moral imperatives that often clash in America—individual rights and communal solidarity—must be reconciled and nurtured.
That difficult task, rarely even attempted, is the essential business of the Bioethics Center. The Center serves as the academic home to the increasingly complex ethical and social challenges that our society faces, both on an individual and a community level, and the impact of those challenges within law and medicine.
The primary goals of the Center are to respond to these challenges and to foster awareness of them within the University and the larger community through education, research, and service initiatives.
The Bioethics Center strives to be a leader in the ever-evolving world of bioethics. Through an integrative approach and an innovative curriculum the Bioethics Center aims to implement practical ethics in law, health care, and life sciences. Our objectives include:
- Developing educational programs and curricular materials for law and medical students that incorporate ethics, health care law, and humanism
- Promoting education in bioethics for the public and for legal and medical professionals in the community
- Responding to the bioethical challenges faced by local communities and by the nation through public service and community outreach programs
- Examining and answering local, national, and global bioethical questions through research
- Assisting in the formulation of public policy