Dr. Summer Johnson

Summer Johnson, Ph.D. studies ethical issues in novel technologies and the ethics of public health. She is the executive editor of The American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB), of The American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience (AJOB Neuroscience), and author of the AJOB’s Editor’s Blog as well as a monthly column and a number of peer-reviewed papers and essays.
 
Summer is a graduate of the Ph.D. program in Bioethics and Health Policy at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she completed her doctoral work under a Jacob Javits fellowship. Working with Drs. Ruth Faden and Nancy Kass, her dissertation on American ethics counsels was the first to apply empirical analysis to the impact of those bodies on public policy and public life. It has resulted to date in articles in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal and a chapter in the Oxford Textbook on Clinical Research Ethics.
 
She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Indiana University, where she completed a double major in philosophy and bioethics. She was awarded a four-year Lilly Endowment full-tuition scholarship, and completed an additional year at Oxford in philosophy, policy, and economics. She received the Richard D. Young award at Indiana for outstanding scholarship as the first individualized bioethics major.
 
Summer has been selected for a Fulbright, for the 2005 Marcia Pines Award in Bioethics and Health Policy, and has studied in the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions. She worked on bioethics and politics with Jonathan Moreno in the progressive bioethics initiative of the Center for American Progress in Washington, on, e.g., bioethics in bioterrorism and pandemics.
 
Prior to joining The American Journal of Bioethics and Bioethics Education Network, Summer was a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Medicine (Medical Ethics), Director of the ENTRI program, and inaugural director of the masters in bioethics program, all of the Alden March Bioethics Institute. Under her direction, AMBI’s Masters program grew in one year to enroll the largest classes of any U.S. online masters program (in 2007–08), and was selected as the only program to work with Apple Inc., with a full complement of lectures and courses using iTunes University.
 
She authored Ethics in Nanomedicine: a Needs-Assessment and Proposals for the Future, Multiple roles and successes in public bioethics: a response to the public forum critique of bioethics commissions, and Making Public Bioethics Sufficiently Public: The Legitimacy and Authority of Bioethics Commissions, and coauthored Emerging Issues in Nanomedicine and Ethics, Population aging and international development: addressing competing claims of distributive justice, On race and organ markets, Disclosure of Personal Medical Information: Differences among Parents and Affected Adults for Genetic and Nongenetic Conditions, Has the Spread of HPV Vaccine Marketing Conveyed Immunity to Common Sense?, and Ethics of Population-Based Research.
 
Listen to Summer’s interview on Science and Society. Read The Nanoethics Group publishes nanotechnology anthology with Springer and Apple to use Albany Med bioethics degree as model for online teaching initiative.