Kimberley Serpico, EdD, CIP

Kimberley Serpico, EdD, CIP is a research ethicist, educator, and an expert in the protection of the rights and welfare of participants involved in biomedical and social-behavioral research. She is the Associate Director of IRB Operations for the Harvard Longwood Campus (HLC) Schools, including Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Kim has worked in higher education research administration for over 20 years. She received her doctorate in education from Vanderbilt University, an MEd in Higher Education Administration and BS in Psychology, both from Suffolk University. Kim is a Certified IRB Professional (CIP). She also completed the Fellowship at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics.

Kim’s research areas include IRB use of outside expertise, IRB application quality, emerging technologies in research, improvement science, and experiential models of education for researchers. She is a member of the AEREO Consortium, a research lab that advances effective research ethics oversight through empirical research. Kim has published her work in such journals as AJOB Empirical Bioethics, Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, Nature Medicine, and Ethics & Human Research, and developed the CITI Program training module on the risks of novel technologies in research. Kim’s primary area of bioethics interest is moral imagination. As a Fellow, she authored a paper designed to equip IRB practitioners with the tools necessary to maximally interpret The Belmont Report’s ethical guidelines. Through historical and contextual reflection, her Fellowship paper describes how IRB practitioners can contemporize the review of ethical human research using their moral imagination – a skill found at the intersection of creativity, deliberation, and empathy. The paper was published in Research Ethics in 2024 (Serpico, K. (2024). The Belmont Report doesn’t need reform, our moral imagination does. Research Ethics, 20(3), 559-573).