At the Center for Health Justice and Bioethics (CHJB), we envision a world that creates and sustains the conditions and resources to support a collective right to health for all people.

Our research aims to uncover and name the root causes of structural inequities, and to develop solutions in partnership with marginalized communities to support their self-determined goals for health. We achieve this primarily through community-partnered initiatives, which we evaluate and disseminate to the broader community. Our major initiatives center around health concerns identified by the North Philadelphia community—violence, trauma, and substance use disorder. In addition, we house a maternal health equity core, which works to improve outcomes through clinical research and implementation science.  

Our faculty team are interdisciplinary, with training in social sciences, law, social work, pharmacy, midwifery, health policy, psychology, and more. We also have multiple strong partnerships with clinical faculty, who have secondary appointments with us and are building careers focused on community-based research and translational and implementation science. Our faculty contribute to published work in prominent bioethics and health policy journals. This work includes conceptual and normative bioethics scholarship, as well as qualitative and quantitative empirical work with areas of focus related to health justice such as: violence prevention, mobile and primary care trust building, substance use disorder treatment, stigma and discrimination, and others.