My health, your health, our health: ethics at the heart of public health

Professor Angus Dawson
Professor of Public Health Ethics and
Head of Medicine, Ethics, Society & History (MESH)
School of Health and Population Sciences

Angus Dawson was appointed as Professor of Public Health Ethics at the University of Birmingham from the 1st August 2011. He studied for a BA in philosophy at the University of Sussex (1989), a Masters in Health Care Ethics at the University of Liverpool (1990) and a PhD in philosophy at the University of Manchester (2000). After temporary posts at Manchester, Liverpool and St. Martin’s College, Lancaster, he was appointed as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Ethics and Philosophy at Keele University. He was the founding Director of the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele, where the focus was on teaching ethics to mid-career health care professionals. Since arriving at Birmingham he has been Head of Medicine, Ethics, Society & History (MESH), within the School of Health and Population Sciences.  His main research interests are in public health ethics (particularly vaccinations and issues related to lifestyle choices) and the use of empirical evidence in moral arguments (particularly in relation to problems in gaining informed consent in clinical trials). He was joint founder and is the present joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal Public Health Ethics and joint coordinator of the International Association of Bioethics’ Public Health Ethics Network (InterPHEN). He has been involved in research and policy projects funded by the Health Protection Agency, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the European Union, the Wellcome Trust and the Public Health Agency of Canada on a range of issues related to public health ethics. He has been editor or co-editor of four collections of original papers mainly on topics in public health ethics, including (with Marcel Verweij) Prevention, Ethics, & Public Health, Oxford University Press (2007) and Dawson, A. (ed.) Public Health Ethics: Key Concepts and Issues in Policy and Practice, Cambridge University Press (2011).

This lecture is open to all, pre-registration is not required