Research with High-Risk Populations : Balancing Science, Ethics, and Law

This title provides guidance to social scientists regarding their ethical and legal responsibilities to respond appropriately to threats of harm that may arise during the course of data collection.

David Buchanan, DrPH, is a Full Professor of Public Health, Director of the Division of Community Health Studies, and Director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His primary area of research lies in analyzing the ethical foundations of public health and approaches to improving population health and quality of life. He has focused in particular on the role of public health policies and programs in promoting justice and expanding human autonomy as pre-requisite to improving population-based health status indicators. In the early 2000s, he spent 3 years at the NIH as an invited research fellow in public health ethics. He is currently a co-investigator on a project aimed at defining ethical standards for conducting research in international settings, in conjunction with the Medical Research Council and the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and the co-Director of the Leadership in Global Health project now underway in the southern African region, including Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Mozambique and South Africa. Dr. Buchanan is the author of more than 70 articles on empirical and ethical issues in public health and 3 books, including An Ethic for Health Promotion: Rethinking the Sources of Human Well Being. He earned his Master's degree and doctorate in public health at the University of California, Berkeley.

Celia B.Dr. Fisher chaired the American Psychological Association's Ethics Code Task Force and the New York State Licensing Board for Psychology and served on the National Institutes of Mental Health Data Safety and Monitoring Board, and the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Clinical Research Involving Children. Dr Fisher is author of Decoding the Ethics Code: A Practical Guide for Psychologists (Sage Publications), co-editor of 7 books including The Handbook of Ethical Research with Ethnocultural Populations and Communities and The Encyclopedia of Applied Developmental Science. (Sage Publications), and author of over 100 theoretical and empirical publications in the areas of ethics in medical and social science research and practice and life span development. Her federally funded research programs focus on ethical issues and well-being of vulnerable populations including ethnic minority youth and families, active drug users, college students at risk for drinking problems, and adults with impaired consent capacity.

Lance A. Gable, JD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Law at Wayne State University Law School and a Scholar with the Centers for Law and the Public's Health: A Collaborative at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities, a Collaborating Center of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Professor Gable specializes in public health law, ethics, and policy; research ethics; bioterrorism and emergency preparedness; mental health; international human rights; genetics and genomics; and information privacy. He has authored or co-authored numerous publications on topics related to public health law and policy. In addition, Professor Gable has worked as a health law expert on projects for the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the Pan American Health Organization.

Prior to joining the Wayne State faculty, Professor Gable was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Law and the Public's Health from 2004 to 2006. He also served as the Project Director for the Emergency System for Advance Registration of Volunteer Health Professionals (ESAR-VHP) - Legal and Regulatory Issues Project, from 2004 to 2006.

In 2004, Professor Gable served as a Professorial Lecturer at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, where he taught a course on the politics of international health. From 2003-2004, Professor Gable was the Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in Bioterrorism Law and Policy at the Center for Law and the Public's Health. He practiced health law at a major international law firm in Washington, DC from 2001 to 2002.

Professor Gable received a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center and a Masters in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2001. He received a Bachelors Degree with a double major in political science and biology from the Johns Hopkins University in 1995.