Health scientist and philosopher Marianne Boenink has been appointed professor in Ethics of Healthcare at the Radboud University/ Radboudumc, as of 1 August 2020.
As a professor, Marianne Boenink will focus in particular on ethics of novel biomedical technologies. New technical possibilities in healthcare are often accompanied by visions raising high expectations, like ‘personalized medicine’ and ‘smart healthcare’. One of Marianne’s lines of research deals with the analysis of such visions of the future: how do they shift ideas about health, disease and good care? A second line of work is focused at specific innovations. For example: what does it mean - for patients, professionals and society- if predictions of who will get a disease and how it will evolve become ever more reliable? Marianne Boenink will investigate the ethical desirability of such technological developments.
Following her training as a health scientist in Maastricht, Marianne Boenink (Zelhem, 1965) studied philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Here she also completed a PhD on the ways in which philosophical and literary texts shape readers’ thinking about normative questions. Her continued fascination with the world of healthcare subsequently led her to a postdoc project exploring ethical issues in predictive genetic testing. As an assistant/associate professor at the University of Twente Marianne’s research was fully oriented towards the question how novel biomedical technologies can be developed and implemented in a responsible manner.
Marianne Boenink is a member of the department of IQ Healthcare. She is an ethical advisor for several European research projects and also is a member of the regional Ethical Review Board for medical research with humans, CMO Arnhem/Nijmegen.
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