Medical Ethics and Health Policy Research

Led by Dr. Amy McGuire and Dr. Lynnette Averill, the ELIPSIS program has become a national voice on how psychedelic medicine should be studied, regulated, and delivered. Its work includes a consensus-based ethics and policy framework for psychedelic clinical care, practical guides for IRBs and investigators reviewing psychedelic protocols, and the TRIPS Study, which examines unregulated psychedelic retreats in the U.S.

As federal policy shifts and clinical interest grows, ELIPSIS is positioned to inform how these therapies move responsibly from research into practice. The program welcomes collaborators, advocates, and funders who share that goal.

Commercial spaceflight is opening the door for private citizens to take part in space health research, raising new questions about consent, acceptable risk, and oversight. In partnership with the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), METEORS, led by Dr. Amy McGuire and Dr. Vasiliki (Vaso) Rahimzadeh, addresses these questions by developing ethical guidance and review support for civilian spaceflight research.

The team’s work, including an analysis published in Science, helps define how the field can pursue human space exploration while protecting the people who make it possible.

Led by Dr. Jenny Blumenthal-Barby, the Center’s Philosophical Bioethics initiatives make the case that philosophy remains essential to the field, challenging existing frameworks and developing the concepts bioethics needs to move forward. This work connects Center faculty and postdoctoral fellows with peers through a national consortium supported by the Greenwall Foundation and a regional network spanning Rice University and UTMB.

Recent scholarship has examined suffering and disorders of consciousness, decisional autonomy, the foundations of clinical ethics, and the responsible use of AI in patient care. Together, this work lays conceptual groundwork for several of the Center’s emerging research areas.

Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Humanities-based Health AI Innovation (CHHAIN) is a joint center of Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine. It is co-directed by Dr. Vasiliki (Vaso) Rahimzadeh of the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy and Dr. Kirsten Ostherr, director of Rice’s Medical Humanities Research Institute. While questions of bias in AI have drawn growing attention, the specific challenges facing patients and clinicians remain underexplored.

CHHAIN brings together scholars in the humanities, bioethics, healthcare, and technology to study how patients experience AI-mediated care and to turn those findings into practical guidance for developers. Guiding questions include how to preserve patients’ humanity as AI becomes more autonomous, how marginalized patients can keep a voice in their own care, and whether patients should have the right to decline sharing their stories with AI systems.

This work positions the Center at the forefront of humanities-informed approaches to trustworthy health AI, with growing opportunities for cross-institutional collaboration, public education, and additional funding.

Supported by the Philip Rothenberg Endowed Fund, this research explores fundamental questions about the nature of consciousness, identity, and being, including whether and in what form aspects of the self may persist beyond physical embodiment.

Through the Ethical Legal Implications of Psychedelics in Society (ELIPSIS) program, led by Dr. Amy McGuire, we are expanding research on the role of psychedelics in medicine and society. This includes early-stage work exploring the relationship between psychedelic experiences and near-death phenomenology, with the goal of better understanding consciousness, transformation, and care at the end of life.

In parallel, this initiative draws on ongoing work led by Dr. Jenny Blumenthal-Barby, which explores how we define and understand consciousness in patients with disorders of consciousness and examines how technology shapes identity, consciousness, and emotional experience. This includes emerging work on technology-mediated grief, such as “griefbots,” and related questions about digital identity and persistence.

These efforts are laying the groundwork for a broader research agenda at the intersection of ethics, consciousness studies, and technological change. As this area develops, there are growing opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, pilot research, and external funding to further define and expand this line of inquiry.