By Mia McCauley, Student Intern
How would you want to be cared for when you’re sick? How can doctors balance scientific advancement with human-centered and interfaith-informed care? This February, nearly 200 UW-Madison students, faculty, staff, and community members sought to answer pressing bioethical questions over two days of thoughtful dialogue across traditions.
The conference, hosted by the Center for Interfaith Dialogue and the Islamic STEM Association, brought together students, clinicians, religious leaders, and bioethicists to examine how faith, spiritual traditions, and secular ethics shape approaches to medicine and research. Through centering interfaith perspectives that are often marginalized in STEM spaces, this conference helped empower students with resources they will use in their future. Students explored the ways in which medicine can center a commitment to human justice, accountability, and compassionate care.
Interfaith Bioethics: Faith, Justice and Pluralistic Futures took place on February 14 and 15 and featured a combination of keynote speakers, panel discussions, and other opportunities for deeply reflective discussion. A central event highlight was the keynote conversation with members of the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman from rural Virginia whose cervical cancer cells, taken without her consent in 1951, became the first immortal human cell line (HeLa cells), transforming medical research worldwide.
Dr. Aasim Padela, MD, MSc, FACEP, delivered the Saturday keynote, offering a meaningful look at how religion and science are not inherently at odds, but can work in tandem as ways to understand and engage with questions around life and death. An emergency medicine physician and scholar of Islamic bioethics, Dr. Padela spoke about ethical approaches to brain death and palliative care, highlighting the necessity of caring for individual humans rather than focusing on the medicine alone.
Center for Interfaith Dialogue Program Coordinator Talia Ivry said, “Even though I don’t work in healthcare, each of us will have to deal with the question of how we or our loved ones want to be cared for when we’re sick one day. In that sense, bioethics applies to every one of us.”
With students as the leaders of this initiative, this conference reflected the lived realities, values, and questions that many students bring with them into STEM fields.
“Once I got involved with the Center for Interfaith Dialogue’s Interfaith Fellows Program, I met other students who were just as intrigued by the intersection between religion and bioethics,” said Dhoondia. “This experience reinforced the importance of bringing the conversations we had been having with The Islamic STEM Association (iSTEM) to a broader audience. It inspired the idea of an “Interfaith Bioethics Conference,” which I then pitched to the Center for Interfaith Dialogue. Since then, we have continued working together to create a larger space for these conversations, one that can engage the wider campus community. That shared interest is what motivated us to bring this Bioethics conference to life.”
Through this conference, students were able to not only envision themselves as skilled leaders but also as individuals with a deep awareness of their ethical responsibilities.
“The conference is one of the best dialogues I have seen so far at UW-Madison, ” said one student attendee. “The university [should definitely] have more of these niche events.”
From the development of a strong moral foundation, attendees are now empowered to act with greater intention, make thoughtful decisions and hold themselves to higher standards of accountability.
“Part of the job of the university is to equip students with the knowledge to go forward and be successful in their career paths, academically and beyond, ” said Ivry. “This conference was a chance for the students to learn about event planning, accessibility, communications, and program coordination in addition to the academic subjects that will be discussed. I hope the conference gave current and future medical professionals a chance to reflect on what it means to treat the whole person– their beliefs, their fears, their wishes. Attendees now have more knowledge about Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, Indigenous American, Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish, Hindu, and secular approaches to bioethics and medical decision-making, which will help them to better treat these communities.”
For more information on Bioethics: Faith, Justice, and Pluralistic Futures, or to view the full conference program, click here.
The conference was made possible by the following units and organizations:
Student Affairs, Global Health Institute, Population Health Institute, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Obstetrics & Gynecology, Kinesiology, WISCIENCE, English Department, Jewish Studies, Pre-Health & Pre-Law Advising, Black Cultural Center, Medical History & Bioethics, Carbone Cancer Centers for Community Outreach and Engagement and Cancer Health Disparities Initiative, Gender and Women’s Studies, the Global Badger Experience Grant, WI Experience Grant, ASM Events Grant, and Augsburg University. Khadijah also received the Cyrena Pondrom Leadership Award to support the conference.