Rebecca Kukla

Rebecca Kukla, "a philosopher by training and by birth, now spends as much of her time studying the ethics and culture of women's health care, and collaborating with obstetricians and anthropologists, as she does on more traditional philosophical topics such as the nature of objectivity and the role of the imagination in cognition. Rebecca is the daughter of philosopher André Kukla."

"Rebecca Kukla's research interests include reproductive ethics and the culture of pregnancy and motherhood, public health ethics, the ethics of health communication, research ethics, methodological issues in medical research, and the social epistemology of medicine. Much of her research bridges bioethics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Of late, she has particularly been interested in ethical and epistemological issues surrounding risk reasoning and communication. She explores these issues at all levels of medical practice, from trial design and the interpretation of scientific results, to evidence-based medicine guidelines, to physician-patient communication, to health promotion campaigns and media representations of risk, to laypeople's judgments and discussions about risk."

Grants CV

• 2009 University of South Florida Humanities Institute Research Award, “Recognizing Norms”, $5000.
• 2006-9 SSHRC Standard Research Grant, “Autonomy and the Negotiation of Information in Reproductive Health Care”, $100,565.
• 2006 University of Michigan Institute on Women and Gender, “Risk in Obstetrics”, $7500 US
• 2005 Carleton University, “Representations of Risk in Obstetrics”, $4000
• 2000 SSHRC, “Science as Social Practice”, $2600
• 1999 SSHRC, “Myth, Memory and Misrecognition in Epistemology”, $3000
• 1998 SSHRC, “Myth, Memory and Misrecognition in Epistemology”, $3000
• 1997 National Endowment for the Humanities, $1200 U.S. + travel/living, summer research institute on Background Practices, UC-Santa Cruz.
• 1994 National Endowment for the Humanities, $1400 U.S. + travel/living, summer research institute on Embodiment, UC-Santa Cruz
• 1991 Mellon Fellowship for Summer Language Study (French, La Pocatière, Quebec)

Service to the Profession

• Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics
• Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University
• Co-coordinator, Feminist Approaches to Bioethics Network, 2008-2010.
• Philosophy subcommittee program chair, American Society of Bioethics and the Humanities, 2009.
• Review Committee Member, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship Program, 2008-2009.
• Program Co-coordinator, Feminist Approaches to Bioethics Congress, Croatia 2008.
• SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship National Committee, 2006-2008.

Academic background

She received her B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1990 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 1996. From 2003-2005, she was a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at The Johns Hopkins University. In the summer of 2004, she was a Visiting Scholar at the USDA, studying ethical issues concerning food and nutrition assistance programs. She also received her Sommelier certification from Algonquin College in 2007.