Itai Bavli is a Research Associate and a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics (CAE). Before taking this positions, I served as a Visiting Associate at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science, and completed two Postdoctoral Research Fellowships at UBC’s School of Population and Public Health and Boston University’s (BU) School of Public Health.
My research and teaching focus on social scientific and ethical approaches to health, medicine and technology. I have worked on developing a novel analytical lens for understanding the historical, social and ethical aspects of public health decisions that have been wrong and have had harmful effects. A core concern of my work has been to explore public health errors and their intersection with social inequalities, medical racism, and ties between governments and the pharmaceutical industry. My work has examined these issues in connection with the opioid crisis in North America, the ethics of evidence of drug regulation, and conflicts of interest in biomedical research.
My work in the fields of health medicine and society has been published in field-leading peer reviewed journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, The British Medical Journal, The American Journal of Public Health, Public Health Ethics, Addiction, AJOB Empirical Bioethics and AI & Society. I have also published in broader forums for wider publics, including The Conversation, and I have given multiple interviews to various media outlets. For example, I was recently interviewed by STAT News as part of their “Embedded Bias” series to discuss my research on the racialization of the X-ray machine in the US.