International bioethics think tank appoints associate professor to board of directors

Go ahead, ask any little girl you know what she wants to do when she grows up. Bet you anything, philosopher and bioethicist won’t even make their list, but Marin Gillis, Ph.D. wasn’t your typical little girl. As a child growing up in northern Saskatchewan, Canada, she battled severe immune system disorders and wanted to be a doctor like the ones she met in her frequent hospital stays. She also considered becoming a scientist, but when she learned that she’d have to sacrifice animals for experiments, she decided on law. As a graduate student, she she combined her passion of advocacy and medical science and became a doctor of philosophy, specializing in bioethics.

HWCOM Associate Professor Marin Gillis, Ph.D.

Gillis, an associate professor at the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, has just been appointed to the Board of Directors of the Global Bioethics Initiative (GBI) – an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to improving quality of life in vulnerable populations around the world, through research, education,and policy change recommendations.

“I’m honored and delighted to be a part of leadership of GBI,” said Gillis who serves as director of Integrated Ethics and Humanities for the HWCOM’s Department of Humanities, Health, and Society. “The organization’s mission of finding practical solutions to social justice challenges in health through research, education and policy change is very much in line with ours at the College of Medicine.”

At FIU, Gillis teaches medical students and prepares them for the ethical issues they will face in their jobs as healers – situations in which scientific facts may clash with their own professional, personal and religious values. For example, should physicians assist in the legal lethal injection of prisoners? How should they balance the interests of a pregnant woman and her unborn child when trying to save the mother, may harm the fetus? How to distribute scare medical resources in a fair manner?

GBI is a United Nations Department of Public Information-associated Non-Governmental Organization (DPI-NGO) that is focused on issues such as human organ transplantation and trafficking, and ethical issues surrounding End-of-Life and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART). GBI organizes periodic focus groups, workshops, panel discussions and conferences to develop policies addressing health disparities around the world.

“The first time I spoke about stem cell research at a conference at the United Nations Plaza, which is how the people at GBI first learned of me, I had tears in my eyes,” recalled Gillis. “I could see the UN Assembly from the window of the room I was in.”

Before she started her speech, she was moved to tell the international audience that her elementary school, in the middle-of-nowhere Saskatchewan, was named in memory of Dag Hammarskjold, the United Nations Secretary-General killed in a plane crash during a peace mission to the Congo. In choosing the name, school officials had hoped it would serve as inspiration to one of its students.

“So you see, while this appointment is wonderful and humbling, it is really something not entirely inexplicable,” said Gillis.