Virginia A. Brown, MA, PhD

Virginia A. Brown, MA, PhD is a Research Scholar at The Hastings Center for Bioethics, where she focuses on social justice and population health. She received her BA from Boston University and her MA and PhD from Howard University. She joined the Center in September 2023 from the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School, where she served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Health and Associate Director of the Liberal Arts Honors Program.

Brown’s scholarship centers on protecting the autonomy of individuals living with serious mental illness through psychiatric advance directives. As a public sociologist and an applied bioethicist, she employs social science tools to frame ethical challenges in health care as public issues rather than private troubles, striving to “engage multiple publics in multiple ways.” Her work addresses health inequities at individual, community, and institutional levels—work she describes as giving her “the moral courage to speak truth to power.”

At The Hastings Center for Bioethics, Brown continues to explore the question: What does bioethics owe justice? She serves as the principal investigator on the PCORI-funded Science of Engagement project, which examines organizational trustworthiness in community-engaged research. This project will develop a first of its kind psychometric scale to examine the psychometric properties of a new measure of organizational trustworthiness codeveloped with patients and other partners. Through this work, she collaborates to advance public engagement and strengthen trust between research institutions and the communities they serve.