Joanna Smolenski, PhD

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES HEALTH (UCLA Health)

Joanna Smolenski, Ph.D., is a Clinical Ethics Fellow at the UCLA Health Ethics Center, where she provides supervised clinical ethics consultation, on call coverage, and education throughout the UCLA Health system, as well as assistance in developing policies, service as a member of three ethics committees and participation in research projects and individual scholarship.

Prior to her work at UCLA, Dr. Smolenski completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, focusing on ethics, applied ethics (especially bioethics), social epistemology, and moral psychology. Her dissertation examined the theoretical underpinnings of informed consent, and argued that it serves to protect what she termed the “bodily self-sovereignty” of patients. The dissertation also considered two ‘case studies’ that illustrate the moral importance of securing informed consent – consent in psychiatrically ill populations, and consent to research that involves modification of the genetic germline. 

Before coming to CUNY, Dr. Smolenski pursued graduate studies in Bioethics at NYU’s Center for Bioethics and was a John Jay Scholar in Philosophy and Political Science at Columbia University, where she graduated magna cum laude with honors in Philosophy. Her work on the ethics of editing the human germline has been featured in Nature and the American Journal of Bioethics, and she has spoken widely at various conferences and workshops across the United States and Europe.