The Department of Global Health & Social Medicine has reason to celebrate: Giulia Cavaliere, a Wellcome-Trust funded PhD student at the department, was awarded a 2018 Dan David Prize Scholarship Award in Bioethics.

The Dan David Prize Scholarship is a competitive international award endowed by the Tel Aviv-based Dan David Foundation. Each year, ten scholarships of US$15,000 are given to outstanding doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers of exceptional promise worldwide.

Giulia Cavaliere has received the Dan David Scholarship for her research in the field of bioethics. Her research, which is supervised by Dr Silvia Camporesi and Professor Barbara Prainsack, and mentored by Professor John Harris, focuses on ethical and social questions raised by new assisted reproductive technologies and practices such as mitochondrial replacement techniques and genome editing applied to human embryos. In particular, Giulia is interested in how ethically contested reproductive technologies and practices can be justly and democratically governed in order to serve the public good.

Giulia has already published several papers in prestigious bioethics journals such as BMC Medical Ethics, the Journal of Medical Ethics, and Medicine Health Care and Philosophy. She has discussed a range of ethical issues including the possibility to extend the 14-day statutory limit for embryo research, the use of genome editing in the context of assisted reproduction, and the question of reproductive freedom within the debate on the ethics of mitochondrial replacement techniques.

Drawing on her research on eugenics and assisted reproduction, Giulia is planning to use the Dan David Scholarship to carry out research concerning the wide-reaching effects of procreative decisions. She plans to investigate how such decisions have an impact on our humanly and naturally constituted environment and to challenge the standard framework to discuss the ethics of procreative decisions – the individually-centred framework inspired by reproductive freedom.

Giulia would like to thank her supervisors Dr Silvia Camporesi and Professor Barbara Prainsack, and her mentor Professor John Harris, for their ongoing dedication and support.

Congratulations, Giulia!