Nurse-Ethicist Christine Grady joins the faculty of the Pellegrino Center

Posted in Announcement Faculty News Story

Christine Grady, RN, PhD, FAAN (N’74, G’93), bioethicist and former chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, has been appointed to the faculty of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics. She has also been appointed as a Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Her primary appointment will be as senior advisor to the Executive Vice President for Health Sciences on bioethics and neuroethics, and as a professor of neuroscience in the School of Medicine. She holds a secondary appointment in Georgetown’s College of Arts & Sciences as an affiliated faculty member in the department of Philosophy, and will also also work closely with Berkley School of Nursing faculty to collaborate and amplify bioethics and clinical scholarly output. She will join the Ethics Consultation Service, an advisory service that the PCCB conducts on behalf of the MedStar Georgetown University Hospital Ethics Committee to assist patients, families, and all health care professionals in identifying, analyzing, and resolving ethical dilemmas.

Dr. Grady’s career includes service on the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues from 2010 to 2017, just after Dr. Pellegrino headed the Commission. She has been a regular presence at the Pellegrino Center, having delivered the annual John Collins Harvey Lecture in 2016 and serving as a featured speaker at the Pellegrino Centennial in 2020.

She served as an affiliated faculty member at the KIE and will be a featured speaker at this week’s Festschrift in honor of the life and work of Tom Beauchamp (1929 – 2025), bioethics pioneer and Georgetown professor, with whom she studied. In addition, she will be the keynote speaker at this year’s June 9-11 Intensive Bioethics Course, a decades-long institution at Georgetown and one of the most well-known and well-regarded courses in the world.

Dr. Grady has deep roots at Georgetown, earning both her undergraduate nursing degree and her PhD here. She will be teaching, writing, and working with the Pellegrino Center’s Ethics Consultation Service. In a School of Medicine profile published on March 24, 2026, she describes her decision to return to Georgetown as an opportunity to engage collaboratively with past, present, and future questions in bioethics.

“I love the opportunities for collaboration that Georgetown brings,” Grady said. “Being in a place where hard science converges with philosophy, the humanities and clinical work — all the things that make ethics so rich and so necessary — that’s where I want to be.”

“Dr. Grady is a long-time friend and colleague,” said Myles Sheehan, Director of the Pellegrino Center, noting that she was present at last year’s dedication of the new Pellegrino Room at MedStar Georgetown and shared her warm memories of Dr. Pellegrino. “We are really delighted that she will be joining us in a formal capacity and that more students, clinicians, and colleagues will be able to benefit, as we have, from her wisdom and experience.”

Read the announcement from the office of Dr. Norman Beauchamp, Executive Vice President for Health Sciences, School of Medicine
Read the School of Medicine profile