Dr. Nir Eyal is an international authority in population-level bioethics with research in health inequalities, health promotion and research ethics, especially in resource-poor settings.
Why you should listen
Nir Eyal, DPhil is the inaugural Henry Rutgers Professor of Bioethics at the School of Public Health and the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He directs Rutgers's Center for Population-Level Bioethics. Eyal's work engages many bioethics challenges, including health care rationing in resource-poor settings, critical health worker shortages, personal responsibility for health and "nudging" for health promotion, disaster response and ethics in HIV- and emerging infection trials. He is a coauthor of a WHO report and has coedited multiple volumes and journal symposia. He also coedits the Oxford University Press series Population Level Bioethics.
Eyal came to Rutgers from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Previously, he worked at Harvard Medical School and, earlier, was the Harold T. Shapiro Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioethics at Princeton University and a Postdoctoral Fellow in bioethics at the NIH. He holds a DPhil in Politics and International Relations from Oxford University, an MA in Philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel and a BA in Philosophy and History from Tel-Aviv University.
Nir Eyal’s TED Talk
Nir Eyal, Chris Anderson, David Biello
The case to infect volunteers with COVID-19 to accelerate vaccine testing
18 minutes 24 secondsConventional vaccine testing is a slow, years-long process. As thousands of people continue to die each day from COVID-19, bioethicist Nir Eyal proposes a radical idea that could dramatically accelerate the vaccine development timeline: "human challenge trials," in which scientists would deliberately expose volunteers to the virus to more quickly determine a vaccine's efficacy. (This virtual conversation, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson, was recorded June 15, 2020.)Posted Jun 2020
