Ann Mongoven

Ann Mongoven is the associate director of Health Care Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Mongoven’s roles at the Ethics Center include: clinical ethics service and consultation; research in health care ethics and policy; media commentary; and educational mentorship.

Mongoven has taught medical, nursing, undergraduate, and graduate students in bioethics, medical humanities, and health policy. Within institutional bioethics, she has served on a state Institutional Review Board regulating human subjects’ protection, a hospital ethics committee, and offered training workshops for hospital ethics committees. Her interest in end-of-life issues has been shaped by work as a volunteer advocate as well as by professional roles in clinical ethics. In public-policy-related work, Mongoven served on the staff of a congressional commission envisioning Medicare payment reform, and as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on transplantation ethics.

Mongoven seeks to foster deliberative approaches to complex ethical issues and negotiation of associated tradeoffs in public life. Her 2009 book Just Love: Transforming Civic Virtue (Indiana University Press) drew from the example of ordinary moral heroes to reflect on how passionate personal commitments and public-mindedness can mutually inform each other. She received a Lilly Teaching Fellowship at Michigan State University for developing deliberative approaches to classroom learning. She also facilitated a statewide deliberative process on ethics policy for a Michigan public health biobank.

Mongoven has special commitments to addressing gender and cultural challenges in bioethics. She completed a fellowship in Women’s Studies in Religion at Harvard Divinity School and another in cross-cultural bioethics at Tokyo University. She has also collaborated with bioethicists in China and in East Africa.

Mongoven holds a doctorate in Religious Studies/Ethics (University of Virginia) and a Masters of Public Health (Johns Hopkins University).