Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Department of Philosophy

Department of Social Medicine

email: rlwalker@email.unc.edu

office: 111 Whitehead Hall and 333E MacNider 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 has focused 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. Together with other researchers at UNC and in the Triangle area, I recently launched the Animal Studies Project, which aims to build community and collaborative opportunities for researchers working in the diverse fields of animal studies and animal ethics. I am currently a Fellow in the Academic Leadership Program at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.

I recently published a monograph, Of Mice and Primates: Virtue Ethics and Animal Research with OUP press. I have also co-edited four collected volumes: Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, Oxford University Press (2007); Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations Across the Disciplines, UNC Press (2016); The Social Medicine Reader, third edition, Volumes 1 and 2, Duke University Press (2019). My original research has appeared in: PLoS Medicine, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Ethics & Human Research, The Hastings Center Report, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Nature Biotechnology, Bioethics, AMA Journal of Ethics, Journal of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Health Economics, North Carolina Law Review, Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Criminal Justice Ethics, American Journal of Bioethics, and Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, among other venues.

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. More 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.”