Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Department of Philosophy
Department of Social Medicine
email: rlwalker@email.unc.edu
office: 333E MacNider Hall or 204 Caldwell Hall
I am a philosopher of medicine whose primary focus is on the relationship between moral theories and concepts and various biomedical practices. My work focuses on biomedical research including animal research, phase I healthy volunteer research, and genomic advances. In addition, I work on topics in health care including professional ethics, distributive justice and concepts of autonomy. I use philosophical and social science methods.
In 2001, I completed a Greenwall post-doctoral fellowship in bioethics and health policy at Johns Hopkins University. I then held a visiting faculty position in the philosophy department at the University of Michigan, where I was also project director for the Life Sciences, Values and Society Program. In 2003, I moved to UNC where I am now a professor in the philosophy department in the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of social medicine in the School of Medicine. I teach medical students during the foundational phase of their curriculum and both undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy. In the past, I have served on the UNC hospital ethics service, where I was co-director of education, and as a bioethicist on the institutional animal care and use committee. I have been a principal investigator on a National Institutes of Health supported study of comparative model organism research ethics (CMORE) for healthy volunteers, which aimed to provide ethical and policy guidance for phase I healthy volunteer clinical trials. Recently I was part of a team for a National Human Genome Research Institute funded grant on incidental enhancements connected with genome editing technologies. In the College, I am a fellow in the Parr Center for Ethics, a member of the standing advisory committee for the public policy department (where I am also an adjunct professor), and was a past member of the faculty advisory board for the Institute for the Arts and Humanities (where I have held two faculty fellowships). For the UNC campus, I served as an elected member of the committee on Appointments, Promotion, and Tenure and currently serve on the Faculty Hearings Committee. For the state of NC, I served on the Covid-19 advisory committee for allocation of scarce resources and also on the vaccine advisory board. In November of 2021, I was elected as a Hastings Center fellow where I joined others whose work informs, “scholarship and public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, science, and technology.”