Participants // Teilnehmer

Dr. Derek Andrews

Postdoctoral Fellow, Normative Ordnungen, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Derek Andrews recently completed his Ph.D. at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. His research interests lie at the intersection of metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of medicine/psychiatry. His dissertation, entitled, “Psychiatric Natural Kinds: Implications for Nosology, Practice, and Policymaking”, consists of a novel account of the metaphysics of mental disorders and a critical examination of the application of inductive inferences made on the basis of natural kind membership in health care policymaking.

Andrews’ current project aims to investigate the role of disease concepts in the formulation of health care policy and the injustices that may arise as a result of conflicts between disease concepts employed within and across institutional contexts.

Dr. Francesca Cesarano

Postdoctoral Fellow, Normative Ordnungen, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Francesca Cesarano works at the intersection of applied ethics, feminist philosophy, and political philosophy. Her research focuses on questions of moral and political responsibility in contexts of structural injustice, with a particular emphasis on gender-based oppression.

Her current project investigates the practical implications of blaming individuals for their contributions to structural injustice, examining the expressive and epistemic functions of blame as well as the asymmetrical social positions of those involved in “the blame game”. She aims to develop a taxonomy that identifies the conditions under which blame can serve as a constructive moral response to structural injustice, and when it may be better avoided.

Dr. phil. Moníca Cano Abadía

Koordinationsstelle für Geschlechterstudien und Gleichstellung, Universität Graz

Mónica Cano Abadía is a moral and political philosopher. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies – South East Europe (University of Rijeka), and at the Section of Political Philosophy (University of Graz). She has been Senior Scientist and Deputy Head of the ELSI Services and Research Department, and the Gender, Equality, and Diversity Specialist at BBMRI-ERIC (2020-2026). Additionally, she is a lecturer at two master's programmes in Gender Studies (University of Graz and Autonomous University of Madrid). Her current research foci include the integration of sex/gender in biomedical research and the ethics of AI in biomedicine.

Prof. Dr. med. Mirjam Faissner

Professor, Universität zu Lübeck

Mirjam Faissner is a bioethicist, philosopher, and trained medical doctor. As of April 2026, she will be Professor for Theory and Ethics of the Life Sciences at the University of Lübeck. Her research focuses on normative questions in healthcare, with particular attention to diversity, justice, and participation. She examines how societal power structures shape medical knowledge production and healthcare practices, and how these dynamics can be adequately addressed in bioethics. In her research, she often combines empirical qualitative research with philosophical analysis, using participatory methods.

Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst

Professor für Politische Theorie und Philosophie, Direktor des Forschungsinstituts Normative Ordnungen, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy and Director of the Research Center “Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt. His research focuses on questions of justice, democracy and toleration as well as critical theory and practical reason in the Kantian tradition. In 2012 he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation. He is a Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

He held numerous visiting professorships and fellowships in the US, for example at the New School for Social Research, Dartmouth College, Rice University, the University of Michigan and NYU. In 2021, he was a Fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. He is also Visiting Research Professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin.

Important publications: Contexts of Justice (dt. Suhrkamp 1994, engl. Univ. of California Press, 2002), Toleration in Conflict ( Suhrkamp 2003, engl. Cambridge UP, 2013), The Right to Justification (Suhrkamp 2007, engl. Columbia UP, 2012), Justification and Critique (Suhrkamp 2011, engl. Polity, 2013), Normativity and Power (Suhrkamp 2015, engl. Oxford UP 2017), Die noumenale Republik (Suhrkamp 2021, engl. Polity Press 2024).

Dr. med. Christin Hempeler

Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin, Institut für Geschichte und Ethik der Medizin, Universitätsmedizin Halle, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg

Christin Hempeler is a research associate at the Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. She studied medicine, philosophy, and political science in Hannover and is currently completing a part-time MSt in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. She received her medical doctorate from Ruhr-University Bochum with a dissertation examining the use of treatment pressure by relatives of people with serious mental health conditions. Her research focuses on conceptual and normative questions surrounding coercion and treatment pressures in psychiatry, as well as clinical ethics consultations and reproductive ethics.

Prof. Dr. Darrel Moellendorf

Professor für Internationale Politische Theorie und Philosophie, Principal Investigator am Forschungsinstitut Normative Ordnungen, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Darrel Moellendorf is Professor of International Political Theory, Professor of Philosophy, and a member of the research group Normative Orders at Goethe at Johann Wolfgang Universität Frankfurt am Main. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg.

He is the author of Cosmopolitan Justice (2002), Global Inequality Matters (2009), The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and Policy (2014), Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty (2022), and The Examined Illness: A Philosopher Confronts Deadly Disease (forthcoming 2026). He co-edited (with Christopher J. Roederer) Jurisprudence (2004), (with Gillian Brock) Current Debates in Global Justice (2005), (with Thomas Pogge) Global Justice: Seminal Essays (2008), (with Heather Widdows) The Routledge Handbook of Global Ethics (2015), (with Lukas Sparenborg) Klimaethik (2025), and (with Cain Shelley and Lukas), and The Philosophy of Climate Activism (forthcoming 2027).

He has been a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a Senior Fellow at Justitia Amplificata at Goethe Unviersität, Frankfurt, and a Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for Humanities, the Friends of the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst. From 1996 to 2002 he was a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has also taught at San Diego State University, Cal Poly Pomona, and Riverside Community College.

Dr. Alexandra Phelan

Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Senior Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health, Security Faculty Director (Policy), Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health Law

Alexandra Phelan is an international legal scholar and global public health expert in global health law and planetary health. Their research examines the role of law, policy, and governance in mitigating and adapting to the impact of global change events, including climate change and biodiversity loss, on health and infectious diseases. As an advocate and expert, she has been involved in several multilateral treaty negotiations, including the WHO Pandemic Agreement and High Seas Treaty, and regularly advises international organizations, institutions, and governments on equitable and rights-based pandemic prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery.

Dr. Katarina Pitasse-Fragoso

Postdoctoral Fellow, Normative Ordnungen, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main // Universidade Federal Fluminense

Katharina Pitasse-Fragoso is a political philosopher from Rio de Janeiro, trained in Brazil, Belgium, and Germany, with an international and interdisciplinary academic record. She is especially interested in questions about the relationship between political philosophy and real-world injustices, and this is reflected in her academic experience of working in the area of political values.

Dr. Sarah Potthoff

Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin, Institut für Ethik, Geschichte und Theorie der Medizin, Universität Münster

Sarah Potthoff is a sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Ethics, History, and Theory of Medicine at the University of Münster. She specializes in microsociology and qualitative research. Her research addresses the social dimensions of health, ethics in practice, and institutional practices, as well as the lived experience of health and illness—particularly in chronic and invisible conditions. She received her doctorate from Bielefeld University with a dissertation on gender justice and women's courts in India.

Dr. Romina Rekers

Postdoctoral Fellow, Normative Ordnungen, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Romina Rekers is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Graz, where she led the FWF-funded project “A Political Conception of Transitional Justice.” She is an associate member of the Climate Change Field of Excellence at the University of Graz and the principal investigator of the projects “Climate-Health Adaptation Strategies in South America” and “Women’s Participation in Climate-Sensitive Infectious Disease Policy in Paraguay,” supported by the Oxford–Johns Hopkins Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative (GLIDE). She also directed the WHO-funded project “A Case of Co-Production of Climate-Health Research Ethical Rules with Members of Grassroots Women’s Organizations in South America,” implemented by the University of Graz. Her doctoral and postdoctoral research has been supported by grants from the Argentine National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). Her current research project addresses the question of how the transnational and intergenerational nature of infectious diseases should reshape the content of the human right to health.

Mercury Shitindo, Ph.D. Candidate

Executive Director, Africa Bioethics Network; Doctoral Candidate, University of Zaragoza

Mercury Shitindo is a bioethicist and research governance scholar whose work sits at the intersection of global health justice, African philosophy, and the ethics of knowledge production. She is the Chair and Executive Director of the Africa Bioethics Network (ABN) and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the African Journal of Bioethics. Her intellectual contributions include the concepts of ethical quieting, the systematic marginalisation of African ethical frameworks in global research governance and design parity, which holds that normative frameworks must be co-developed with the communities and intellectual traditions they govern. She serves as an ethics expert for the European Commission's Horizon Europe programme and contributes to international initiatives on genomics governance and open science. Her current research examines ethical frameworks for reproductive technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa and the governance of climate-sensitive health research. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Zaragoza.

Dr. Sonja Riegler

Postdoctoral Fellow, Normative Ordnungen, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Sonja Riegler’s research lies at the intersection of social and political philosophy, feminist epistemology, feminist philosophy of science, and Critical Race Studies. She recently completed her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Her dissertation, A Functionalist Approach to Ignorance, supervised by Martin Kusch and Linda Martín Alcoff, develops a novel framework for analyzing socially relevant forms of ignorance, with a central case study on the largely overlooked history of “guest worker” migration to Austria. Her current project, entitled, "How Bureaucracy Knows: Toward a Critical Epistemology of Forms, Rules, and Expertise," advances a critical epistemology of bureaucracy, introducing bureaucracy as a crucial yet underexplored topic in political epistemology, with a particular focus on knowledge practices, forms of expertise, and power asymmetries in bureaucratic encounters.

Dr. Diego Silva

Associate Professor, University of Sydney

Diego Silva is an Associate Professor of Bioethics at Sydney Health Ethics and the University of Sydney School of Public Health. His research centres on public health ethics, particularly the application of political theory in the context of infectious diseases and health security, e.g., tuberculosis, COVID-19, antimicrobial resistance, etc. Diego adopts a mixed methods approach to his work, including the use of qualitative methods and conceptual analysis.

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