2025 Greenwall Foundation Year in Review

As we close out 2025, we’ve been reflecting on the work the Foundation and our community of Scholars and grantees have accomplished amid a rapidly evolving health, education, and research landscape. This year, we continued to support critical, forward-thinking research and foster thoughtful, robust conversations in bioethics. 

We started the year strong, introducing the Foundation’s inaugural Annual Report, which highlighted grants, grantees, and special events from 2024. (Keep an eye out for the 2025 Annual Report coming in the new year!) 

Then, in February, Theater of War Productions staged two Greenwall-commissioned dramatic readings of A REFUTATION—a series of conflicting historical accounts of Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow fever epidemic—in Washington, D.C. Additional performances in Philadelphia followed later in the year. Exploring themes of misinformation and racial inequities in health care, A REFUTATION marked the capstone celebration of the Foundation’s 75th anniversary, drawing from the Foundation’s past commitment to arts funding and looking toward the future, bringing bioethics to new audiences. 

This past spring, we added three new Scholars to our flagship Faculty Scholars Program (FSP): Doni Bloomfield, JD; Katherine Peeler, MD; and Anna Wexler, PhD. We also awarded five Making a Difference (MAD) grants, which will explore humanizing medical records, ethical implementation of oral food challenges in allergy clinical practice, equity in xenotransplantation human clinical trials, patient participation in organ transplant selection committee meetings, and ethics issues related to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) user fee process. Later in the year, we announced three more MAD grants, which will dive into equitable research participation in prisons and jails, narratives of mental health disparities, and how shifting federal priorities are reshaping bioethics. 

There were bittersweet farewells and welcome new additions to the Foundation’s governing bodies. Joel Motley, JD, and Richard Salzer, MD, departed our Board of Directors, and Christine Grady, PhD, exited the Faculty Scholars Program Committee, while Scott Y.H. Kim, MD, PhD—a Class of 2009 Faculty Scholar Alum—joined the FSP Committee this year.

This summer, Ruth R. Faden, PhD—a professor of biomedical ethics and founder of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University—received the annual Bernard Lo, MD Award in Bioethics, recognizing her outstanding mentorship in the field. 

In August, we hosted a webinar, A Bioethics Conversation: Autism Care and Research, featuring an important and nuanced discussion among Faculty Scholar Alums, Joel Michael Reynolds, PhD, and Brent Kious, MD, PhD, and autistic researcher and advocate Zuzana Kazan. We also celebrated Govind Persad, JD, PhD, the latest National Academy of Medicine Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics. 

The Foundation kicked off fall by announcing three new Bridging Bioethics Research & Policymaking grants that seek to bridge the divide between bioethics research results and policymaking in the areas of predictive analytics for overdose prevention, patient advocacy in health policy reform, and the Medicaid benefit for children at end of life. 

In October, we were excited to see Faculty Scholars, Alums, and Committee members; Making a Difference grantees; and former Greenwall interns present at the 2025 American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) Annual Conference. 

We also celebrated five years of Greenwall News, amplifying the excellent work of the Greenwall community. We look forward to continuing to highlight the many accomplishments of our Scholars and grantees; if you aren’t signed up for our monthly newsletter, you can do so here!

We closed out the year with the William C. Stubing Memorial Lecture, which featured former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, MD, in conversation with STAT’s Matthew Herper. They had a timely and wide-ranging conversation about the nation’s crisis of trust in medicine, science, and public health, and how bioethics can help to chart a way forward.

Over the course of the year, the Greenwall community contributed to bioethics conversations in prominent publications. Our Scholars and grantees published more than 300 academic papers and were featured in over 200 news outlets, from TV, to podcasts, to op-eds. 

We end the year with deep gratitude for the Scholars, grantees, and partners who continue to push the field of bioethics forward. We look forward to continuing to nurture bold ideas, facilitate meaningful conversations, and translate critical insights into real-world impact in the years to come.