In the fall of 2025, Michigan State University’s Ethics Institute announced the inaugural recipients of the Ethics Research Fellowship grants. Three additional grants were also awarded for the spring semester of 2026.

Each award is a $15,000 seed grant to jumpstart new scholarship and collaboration across campus. The program, funded through the Ethics Institute, supports small, focused projects that advance ethical inquiry and lay groundwork for external funding, publications, and classroom impact.

Grantees have made progress on their innovative projects, which take a broad view of ethics, spanning how we treat one another, our environment, and our institutions, and emphasizing interdisciplinary teams and student engagement.

Updates from Fall 2025 Ethics Research Fellows

The following are updates on progress toward achieving goals for the fall 2025 research fellows.

Kune Park (School of Social Work) — Ethical Dilemmas at the Intersection of Child Protection and Juvenile Punishment

• The team is grateful for the opportunity to advance a vignette-based qualitative project examining the intersection of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems in relation to racial identity and professional decision-making.
• Since the start of the award period, they have completed the first phase of qualitative coding and preliminary thematic analysis of 60 stakeholder interviews, developed a comprehensive literature review, and submitted a conference abstract to the Society for Social Work and Research.
• Early findings highlight the importance of race-conscious and de-escalation-oriented approaches among child welfare stakeholders when working with youth of color.
• The fellowship has also supported collaborative scholarship, manuscript development, and mentorship opportunities for student researchers engaged in qualitative analysis and dissemination activities.

Michelle T. Pham (Center for Bioethics and Social Justice) and Megh Marathe (Center for Bioethics and Social Justice and Media and Information) — Ethical Oversight in Neural Device Research

• The team completed data collection by conducting 11 qualitative interviews with Institutional Review Board personnel who work at academic medical centers across the country.
• They recently attended the 2026 International Neuroethics Society meeting at Stanford University. Their Graduate Research Assistant, Qingxuan Pan, presented a poster there titled “A Qualitative Study on the Role of IRBs in Implantable Neural Device Research.”
• Over the summer, their team will complete data analysis and begin manuscript writing.

Courtney Venker (Communicative Sciences and Disorders) — Tales of Inclusion? Ethical Representations of Autistic Friendship in Children’s Literature

• As of June 1, the team has conducted two meetings with their stakeholder Community Advisory Board (teachers, librarians, and parents of autistic children) and one meeting with their autistic Community Advisory Board (autistic adolescents and adults with varying support needs).
• Meetings have already exceeded even their highest expectations; during their first group meetings (intended to be introductory/get-to-know-you), CAB members shared insights on autistic friendship that will become central to our qualitative coding scheme.
• Thanks to the ethics fellowship funding, they have been able to order 30 more picture books to analyze, bumping their sample from 116 to 146 books.
• They will continue meetings and begin analysis soon.

Spring 2026 Ethics Research Fellows

The following projects were awarded funding during the spring semester of 2026.

Nadia Abuelezam (College of Human Medicine) — TABEeB: Tolerance of Arab/MENA Clinicians with Biased Experiences and the Bioethical Imperative

• The TaBEeB project examines how Arab/MENA-identifying clinicians ethically navigate and respond to workplace discrimination. Through TaBEeB, they plan to develop a set of concrete, empirically informed, and stakeholder-driven policy recommendations to guide institutional responses to discrimination against Arab/MENA clinicians. (Note: Tabeeb means “healer/doctor” in Arabic).

Dr. Kent Key (Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health) — Conceptualizing Community-Level Ethics Protections in Vulnerable Communities

• Key’s team will explore how community ethical priorities align or conflict with institutional ethical priorities around conducting research in marginalized populations and how community-level priorities complement or challenge individual-level ethical considerations. Their project uses Community-Based Participatory Research methods to critically consider the ethical implications of reexamining processes of informed consent to include community throughout the lifecycle of research participation.

Justin Simard (College of Law) — Reckoning with Slavery and Its Legacy in the Upper South

• Professor Simard and his team analyze the systematic influence of slavery on the law and provide tools for law students, lawyers, scholars, and the public to build a more ethical profession and legal system. During the fellowship, they will verify and provide additional context for a subset of 4,000 cases involving enslaved people in the Upper South.

Beyond funding, fellows participate in a year-long learning community with two convenings, share regular updates, and produce public-facing materials such as a manuscript, case study, or news/podcast piece showcasing progress to MSU leaders, students, and partners.

The Ethics Research Fellows program is designed to be catalytic, providing modest resources to help gather pilot data and identify student roles and interdisciplinary partnerships, which are often the first steps toward earning external grants and recognition in peer-reviewed publications. Proposed projects align with priority areas, including marginalized populations, inclusion, democracy, environment, and religious tolerance.

Visit ethics.msu.edu for more information.