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Exploring Ethics Across Art, Humanities, and Science

May 8 event at Block Museum brings together practitioners of art, engineering, and medicine to discuss emerging ethical questions

As art, engineering, and medicine face a fast-paced, ever-evolving world, practitioners in each discipline face ethical considerations. Whether working with human remains, studying organ donation, or re-engineering the genetic code, questions of consent and personal autonomy, control and access, social responsibility and human rights inevitably emerge.

On May 8, Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art and Northwestern Engineering are hosting “Exploring Ethics: Across Art, Humanities, and Science,” bringing together an interdisciplinary panel that will exchange ideas on how to face these major questions.

The panel includes synthetic biologists Josh Leonard, Julius Lucks, and Danielle Tullman-Ercek, all associate professors of chemical and biological engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering; medical anthropologist Megan Crowley-Matoka, associate professor of medical education at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and transdisciplinary artist Dario Robleto.

Robleto is Northwestern’s inaugural Artist-at-Large, a program organized by McCormick which brings contemporary artists to campus for in-depth exchanges with faculty and students, and is part of the ongoing Art + Engineering Initiative. Robleto’s work is born out of cross-disciplinary research and collaboration and explores the intersections of music, popular culture, language, storytelling, and the histories of science and war.

Each panelist will share specific dilemmas encountered in their own work, and the group will discuss commonalities and differences that could lead to new ways of addressing contemporary ethical concerns.

This event, held at the museum at 6 p.m., is free and open to the public. Register here.