MEET THE COURSE TEAM
Throughout the course you will see information that has been created by a variety of course team members. Some of these individuals appear within videos, and other individuals wrote assessment questions, edited video content, and built the course within the edX platform. Others will help to monitor and respond in the discussion boards.
I. Glenn Cohen
Professor Cohen is one of the world's leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (sometimes also called "medical ethics") and the law, as well as health law. He also teaches civil procedure. From Seoul to Krakow to Vancouver, Professor Cohen has spoken at legal, medical, and industry conferences around the world and his work has appeared in or been covered on PBS, NPR, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones, the New York Times, the New Republic, the Boston Globe, and several other media venues.
He was the youngest professor on the faculty at Harvard Law School (tenured or untenured) both when he joined the faculty in 2008 (at age 29) and when he was tenured as a full professor in 2013 (at age 34), though not the youngest in history.
Professor Cohen's current projects relate to big data, health information technologies, mobile health, reproduction/reproductive technology, research ethics, organ transplantation, rationing in law and medicine, health policy, FDA law, translational medicine, and to medical tourism, the travel of patients who are residents of one country, the "home country," to another country, the "destination country," for medical treatment.
He is the author of more than 80 articles and chapters and his award-winning work has appeared in leading legal (including the Stanford, Cornell, and Southern California Law Reviews), medical (including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA), bioethics (including the American Journal of Bioethics, the Hastings Center Report), scientific (Science, Cell, Nature Reviews Genetics) and public health (the American Journal of Public Health) journals, as well as Op-Eds in the New York Times and Washington Post. Cohen is the editor of The Globalization of Health Care: Legal and Ethical Issues (Oxford University Press, 2013, the introduction of which is available here), the co-editor of Human Subjects Research Regulation: Perspectives on the Future (MIT Press, 2014, co-edited with Holly Lynch, introduction available here), Identified Versus Statistical Lives: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2015, co-edited with Norman Daniels and Nir Eyal , the introduction of which is available here), FDA in the Twenty-First Century: The Challenges of Regulating Drugs and New Technologies (Columbia University Press, 2015, co-edited with Holly Lynch, the introduction of which is available here), The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Health Care Law (Oxford University Press, 2015-2016, co-edited with William B. Sage and Allison K. Hoffman) and the author of Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2014), with two other books in progress.
Prior to becoming a professor he served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and as a lawyer for U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, Appellate Staff, where he handled litigation in the Courts of Appeals and (in conjunction with the Solicitor General’s Office) in the U.S. Supreme Court. In his spare time (where he can find any!) he still litigates, having authored an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court for leading gene scientist Eric Lander in Association of Molecular Pathology v. Myriad, concerning whether human genes are patent eligible subject matter, a brief that was extensively discussed by the Justices at oral argument. Most recently he submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstedt (the Texas abortion case, on behalf of himself, Melissa Murray, and B. Jessie Hill).
Cohen was selected as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow for the 2012-2013 year and by the Greenwall Foundation to receive a Faculty Scholar Award in Bioethics. He is also a Fellow at the Hastings Center, the leading bioethics think tank in the United States. He is currently one of the key co-investigators on a multi-million Football Players Health Study at Harvard which is committed to improving the health of NFL players. He leads the Ethics and Law initiative as part of the multi-million dollar NIH funded Harvard Catalyst | The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center program. He is also one of three editors-in-chief of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, a peer-reviewed journal published by Oxford University Press and serves on the editorial board for the American Journal of Bioethics. He serves on the Steering Committee for Ethics for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Canadian counterpart to the NIH.
Emily Largent is a graduate of Harvard Law School; she earned her P.h.D. in Health Policy, with a concentration in Ethics, from Harvard. Previously, she was a fellow in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health and worked as a nurse at UCLA Medical Center. Her work focuses on normative questions at the intersection of law and medicine.
Noah Marks is a recent graduate of Harvard Law School and is currently clerking in California for federal judges. He grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Before law school, he received a M.A. in Biblical Interpretation from the Jewish Theological Seminary. While at Harvard, Noah worked for the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, Jenner and Block, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Department of Justice. Noah graduated from Swarthmore College in 2011 with a B.S. in Engineering and a B.A. in Religion. He enjoys long form journalism and thinking about the interaction of law and society.
Shailin Thomas is a second year law student in a joint MD/JD program between Harvard Law School and the New York University School of Medicine. He received a B.S. from Yale University, where he studied cognitive neuroscience — exploring the anatomy and physiology underlying social phenomena. His interests lie at the intersection of clinical medicine and the legal forces that shape it. Prior to law school, Shailin worked on both the administrative and clinical sides of health care, and as a research associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is currently an affiliate of the Berkman Center, a Student Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, and Outreach Editor for the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology. Shailin will help to moderate the discussion forum.
Ariel Teshuva is a second year law student at Harvard Law School. She is a graduate of UC San Diego, where she studied international relations and political science. Ariel is interested in the intersection of public policy and private life, and in the way the law must (and often does not) evolve to accommodate new developments in science and technology. At Harvard, Ariel works on the Lawfare blog, represents clients in criminal show-cause hearings as a member of the Harvard Defenders, and is an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Ariel will help to moderate the discussion forum.
Maria Kobrina is a Video Editor and graphic artist at HarvardX, She graduated Summa Cum Laude from Emerson College with a BFA in Visual and Media Arts and has since been working primarily in online education.
Shilpa Idnani is a Course Development Assistant at HarvardX, and has been a part of HarvardX for about two years. She holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Wellesley College, where she specialized in creating interactive computer ecosystem and hydrogeological models. Recently, she has designed, created, and collected materials for wide variety of HarvardX courses including Humanitarian Response to Conflict and Disaster, ContractsX, and First Nights. She will be monitoring the discussion boards for technical issues with the platform and course.
Clint Attebery is a member of the HarvardX team where he develops and produces online courses with a variety of faculty members. He has worked in academic and educational publishing and technology for more than 10 years.