Current Fellows
Lab Fellows
- Lab Fellow, 2011-2013
Kaplan earned a BA at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a Master of Journalism degree from University of California, Berkeley. She is a prize-winning investigative reporter who focuses on the intersection of politics, money and public health. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Politics Daily, Discover, The Nation, The Washington Monthly, and The New Republic, among other publications. She spent many years in Washington, DC, covering lobbying and money-in-politics for a variety of media outlets, among them: Legal Times, ABC News, NBC News, MSNBC on the Internet and PBS.
Her documentary, "Justice for Sale," co-produced with Bill Moyers for FRONTLINE, revealed the corrupting influence of campaign cash on the judicial system; and her earlier documentaries focused on money in federal campaigns. More recently, Kaplan has produced investigative pieces examining the impact of lobbying on public policy, especially on environmental issues, for Dan Rather Reports and for the American University Investigative Reporting Workshop. Kaplan is now finishing a book on industry capture of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the subsequent release of neurotoxicants into the environment. The book will be published by Nation Books, an imprint of Basic Books, and grew out of her 2011-2012 fellowship year project, "The economy of influence shaping American public health and the environment: Documenting institutional corruption at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with emphasis on the intersection of EPA, regulated industries, their lobbyists and Congress. "
Next year, Sheila Kaplan will help develop a television and web series, Institutional Corruption in America, based on the work of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. The goal of the series is to bring the Center's work to a wider audience by broadcasting compelling stories showing citizens how institutional corruption hurts them, personally.
- Lab Fellow, 2012-2014
Kennedy holds a BS in Economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and will receive a PhD in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley in the summer of 2012. In July, she will join The Wharton School as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Legal Studies & Business Ethics. Kennedy's research examines ethical compromises in organizations, particularly those produced by the pursuit and attainment of higher rank in a hierarchy. In 2011, she won the Organization Science dissertation proposal competition for her research on how advancing in a hierarchy affects the expression of dissent. Prior to pursuing her PhD, Kennedy worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. During her fellowship year, she will undertake a project examining hierarchies as socialization mechanisms.
- Lab Fellow, 2012-2013
Kouchaki received her PhD in Organizational Behavior in 2012 from the David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah. Her research focuses on the moral dimension of social life, in particular, ethical behavior in workplace. Her work has appeared in such scholarly publications as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. During her fellowship, she will study the consequences of the prevalent rhetoric of moral and technical superiority of professionals and the systematic ways in which professional self-conceptions influence ethical behaviors. In addition, this line of research focuses on developing practical remedies.
- Lab Fellow, 2012-2013
Changmin Lee is an Assistant Professor in Finance at Kookmin University Business School and Research Assistant Professor of the Department of Finance at Hanyang University Business School in Seoul, Korea. His research focuses on corporate finance, corporate governance, law and finance, boards of directors, executive compensation, management strategy, professional labor markets and organization. He received his PhD and MA from the Department of Economics at Indiana University and his BA from the Economics Department at Seoul National University. He has worked at Capital Market Teams, Samsung Research Institute of Finance. During his fellowship, he will undertake empirical and theoretical research about the function of judiciary and media system. This research attempts to analyze whether the two most popular external governance systems (law and media) work effectively to monitor corrupt behavior of managerial teams.
- Lab Fellow, 2012-2013
Donald Light is a professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, School of Osteopathic Medicine who served for the past three years as the Lokey Visiting Professor of comparative health care at Stanford. After receiving a BA in history from Stanford, an MA in sociology from the University of Chicago, and a PhD in sociology from Brandeis, he served on the faculties of Princeton and City College of New York. Light has been a visiting fellow or professor at the universities of Oxford, Manchester, and Maastricht, Princeton, UCSF, and Columbia. His articles have appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, The Milbank Quarterly, Social Science and Medicine, The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, the American Journal of Public Health, and the New England Journal of Medicine. As a founding fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, he has co-authored with Norman Daniels and Ron Caplan, Benchmarks of Fairness for Health Care Reform (1996) and edited The Risks of Prescription Drugs (2010). As an activist scholar, Light has contributed to successful campaigns against institutional barriers to affordable health insurance (US, Ireland), elective surgery (England), and new global vaccines. He has received the William Foote Whyte Distinguished Career Award in Sociological Practice. His current research concerns the historical roots of institutional corruption in the development of prescription drugs and its consequences.
- Faculty Fellow, 2009-2010
- Lab Fellow, 2010-2013
Marks is Associate Professor of Bioethics, Humanities and Law at the Pennsylvania State University, and director of the bioethics program at the main campus, University Park. He is also a barrister and founding member of Matrix Chambers, London. He received his MA, BCL (equivalent to JD, LLM) from Oxford University and from 2004-06 was a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at Georgetown University Law Center and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Marks was counsel for Human Rights Watch in the Pinochet case, and represented Dr. Nancy Olivieri in the European Court of Justice in a landmark case on industry-funded research and pharmaceutical regulation. His work focuses on the relationship between professional ethics and human rights, neuroethics and neurolaw, and conflicts of interest in scientific research and professional practice. His scholarship has appeared in a variety of journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Law and Medicine, American Journal of Bioethics, and the Hastings Center Report. In 2010-11 Marks was a residential Lab Fellow at the Center, developing normative approaches and practical tools to address conflicts of interest in scientific research and professional practice with a focus on food and nutrition research. In March 2012, he co-organized a symposium at Penn State (co-funded by the Lab) on "Industry Sponsorship and Health-Related Food Research: Institutional Integrity, Ethical Challenges, and Policy Implications." He is continuing this work as a non-residential fellow in 2012-13.
- Lab Fellow, 2012-2013
Maggie McKinley is Co-Principal Investigator of the "Language of Lobbying" Project at the University of Chicago. She received her JD from Stanford Law School and her BA in linguistic anthropology from UCLA. Prior to joining the Center, she served as Manager of Research at the UCLA Ethnography of Autism Project, Principal Policy Producer at the Sloan Center on the Everyday Lives of Families, and practiced civil litigation on behalf of unions and labor federations at Bredhoff & Kaiser in Washington, DC. Following law school, she clerked for the Northern District of California and the Ninth Circuit. Her work has been published in the Stanford Law Review and was awarded the Steven M. Block Civil Liberties Award for excellence in writing in the area of personal freedom. During her fellowship, she will continue work on a two-phase, multi-disciplinary study of federal lobbyists specializing in tax legislation. The first phase will include gathering interview and ethnographic data documenting the everyday practices and ideologies of federal tax lobbyists in DC. The second phase will apply the findings from phase one to analyze trends within public disclosure databases and the tax code.
- Lab Fellow, 2012-2014
Jennifer E. Miller, PhD, Harvard University
Jennifer E. Miller was a fellow in the Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center in the Fordham Schools of Business, where her research focused on the globalization of clinical trials in developing countries, and taught in the Graduate School of Business (2011-2012). She also served as a visiting lecturer in Columbia University's Bioethics and Cross Cultural Education Program (BIOCEP), which included field studies in Thailand. She completed her PhD studies in Bioethics at Regina Apostolorum and holds a BS in physics from Fordham University. Her interdisciplinary scholarship has been complimented by strong public service, including serving as a steering committee member for the US Taskforce on Pediatric Emergency Mass Critical Care under the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC, 2009-2011), as a special consultant to the United Nations ECOSOC (organ facilitating international cooperation on standards-making and problem-solving in economic and social issues), on the AMA's National Disaster Life Support Education Consortium, and as the founder of the nonprofit Bioethics International. During her fellowship, she will explore the possibility of addressing prominent ethics concerns and trust gaps in the pharmaceutical industry through various reform strategies, particularly a third party "ethics accreditation" system.
- Lab Fellow, 2011-2013
Peoples is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his PhD in 2005 from Ohio State University. His work focuses on campaign finance and corruption, examining the social ties between contributors and lawmakers and how these ties influence political decisions (e.g. roll call votes). His work has appeared in scholarly outlets such as Sociological Forum, The Sociological Quarterly, and Research in Political Sociology (among others). He has won awards from various sections of the American Sociological Association for his research. Additionally, he has received a Congressional Research Award from the Dirksen Congressional Center as well as a Presidential Fellowship from the Ohio State University Graduate School. During his fellowship year, Peoples will examine contributor influence on important legislation that ultimately led to the recent global financial crisis.
- Lab Fellow, 2012-2014
Pernell is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at Harvard University and a Canada Program research fellow at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She received an A.M. in Sociology from Harvard University in 2011 and holds a B.A. in Sociology from Beloit College. She studies the social causes of financial crisis and financial market regulation. Her previous research examines the organizational processes that drove U.S. banks and investment banks to underwrite collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) between 1996 and 2007. During her fellowship year, she will investigate the evolution of banking regulation, 1980-2005, in three countries that experienced very different outcomes during the global financial crisis: Spain, Canada, and the United States.