The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) selected Kavita Shah Arora, MD, as the 2021 Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics. Dr. Arora serves as the UNC division director of general obstetrics and gynecology and is an associate professor at UNC, Chapel Hill. Her research centers around reproductive justice and ensuring evidence-based and equitable reproductive health policy, focusing on sterilization disparities.
As a NAM Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics, Dr. Arora will collaborate with distinguished researchers and policy experts and draw on her expertise to help provide bioethics guidance to policymakers, academic leaders, health care administrators, and the public. The Fellowship was established in 2015 to enable early-career bioethics scholars to participate actively in the work of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Fellows participate in evidence-based health care or public health studies and policy-making processes that improve patient care and access.
Since its inception, the NAM Greenwall Fellowship in Bioethics has given early-career bioethicists “a front-row seat to critical deliberations that will be considered by government, academia, and the private sector,” according to the inaugural Fellow, Brendan Saloner, PhD. During the Fellowship, Prof. Saloner worked closely with two consensus committees studying the social determinants of health and affordable drugs.
Faculty Scholar Alum Neal Dickert, MD, PhD, was selected as a Fellow in 2017. Working alongside experts in developing policy-oriented ethics guidance, he found it “very helpful to see the distinctions between how NAM work is conducted and how one goes about traditional academic scholarship.” Recent Fellow, Rachel Fabi, PhD, echoed the value of the connections made as a Fellow: “I have gotten to know people across the academies… as well as people across bioethics and industry, through this work.”
Dr. Arora is excited to use her time as the latest NAM Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics to “learn and be fully immersed in the process by which the NAM interprets and situates empirical findings to craft health policy that is both evidence-based and also patient-centered and equitable.”
The Foundation is excited to continue supporting the NAM Greenwall Fellowship in Bioethics, which will enable Dr. Arora to actively participate in ongoing NAM efforts to address bioethical issues in clinical care, biomedical research, and public policy. Dr. Arora will be the latest Greenwall Fellow to contribute to NAM’s efforts to bring thoughtful, multidisciplinary solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges in health care and public health.