Stephen Latham may be retiring from full-time teaching and as director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, but he has no intention of slowing down.
“It’s a shift of priorities and a shift of activities,” Latham said, describing a chance to pursue research projects, collaborations, writing, and travel opportunities that were difficult to accommodate with a full teaching schedule. “There are a number of things that, if you want to do them, you have to do them during the school year.”
Latham aims to accept a month-long residency at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva; work with the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences’ bioethics program; expand his work with Bexorg, a Yale spinoff company using perfused human brains as a platform for research into diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s; and write a long-planned book based on his popular course, which at its peak enrolled nearly one third of Yale undergraduate students.
“I want to make my big undergraduate course on bioethics and law into a book that can be used to teach non-lawyers about the law governing bioethics in the United States,” he said. “Now I’m confident that I will have the bandwidth to do it.”
In addition, Latham will continue to teach bioethics for the center’s summer and online programs, work with the American Academy of Neurology’s ethics training programs, and chair Yale’s Social Behavioral Institutional Review Board.
“I’m not stepping away entirely,” he said.
Alan Gerber, Sterling Professor of Political Science and director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies — which supports the bioethics center — expressed his gratitude for Latham’s leadership and educational focus.
“Stephen is one of those people who perfectly combine their scholarship, intellectual interests, mentorship, and vision for a more principled society,” Gerber said. “We have been privileged to have him running what has become a global beacon for investigating the ethical treatment of living things. And we are lucky he will continue those pursuits in a different role.”
