
Ethics of Conducting Research with Pregnant Participants
This panel brings together researchers and experts to address the following:
Panelists
Dr. Anne Drapkin Lyerly (Professor of Social Medicine and Research Professor OBGYN, School of Medicine, UNC-Chapel Hill)
Dr. Lyerly's research addresses socially and morally complex issues in women’s health and reproductive medicine, with a focus on how people assign meaning to reproductive events. A central goal of her work is to inform and reframe debates based on the views of those most profoundly affected by them, and to appropriately weight these individuals’ interests in shaping reproductive health care.
After finishing medical school and residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Duke, she completed the Greenwall Fellowship in Bioethics and Health Policy at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities, and spent ten years on the faculty at Duke before joining UNC’s Department of Social Medicine and its Center for Bioethics as its first Associate Director. Dr. Lyerly co-founded the Obstetrics and Gynecology Risk Research Group, which brought together experts from medical epidemiology, anthropology, obstetrics and gynecology, philosophy, bioethics, gender theory and medical humanities for research on how risk is assessed and managed in the context of pregnancy. She is a founder of the Second Wave Initiative, an effort to ensure that the health interests of pregnant people are fairly represented in biomedical research and drug and device policies
Dr. Shawnita Sealy-Jefferson (Associate Professor College of Public Health, Division of Epidemiology, OSU)
Dr. Sealy-Jefferson is a social epidemiologist whose primary research seeks action to combat manifestations of structural racism that limit the human rights of Black families and communities. Dr. Sealy-Jefferson is the Founder, Director, and Principal Investigator of the Social Epidemiology to Eliminate Disparities (SEED) Lab. The mission of the SEED Lab is to conduct high quality epidemiologic research to find solutions to the disproportionate burden of infant mortality among Black women. Specifically, Dr. Sealy-Jefferson’s scholar-activism draws from the Reproductive Justice Framework and seeks to: (1) empirically document associations between systems of oppression and preterm birth (which is the leading cause of infant death), (2) explicate the intervening biologic, social, and psychosocial mechanisms, as well as (3) identify effect modifiers of these associations among Black women. The goal of her scholarship is to inform future intervention studies, policy change, and social activism.
About CARE
CARE events promote multidisciplinary and exploratory discussion of cutting-edge issues in the field of research ethics. In doing so, CARE aims to advance Ohio State’s shared values and build a community around the topic of research integrity.