Laura Guidry-Grimes, PhD, HEC-C is Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioethics at ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½. She is also Staff with the Center for Bioethics at Cleveland Clinic with a faculty appointment in the Department of Medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. She received her PhD in philosophy from Georgetown University with a focus in bioethics. While at Georgetown, she was selected as a Kennedy Institute of Ethics Fellow. The DC area afforded her opportunities to intern for the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, Pan American Health Organization, and MedStar Washington Hospital Center (MWHC). The John J Lynch, MD Center for Ethics at MWHC then hired her as a staff clinical ethicist in 2015. In 2017, she joined faculty in the Department of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) and served as a clinical ethicist for the UAMS Health System and Arkansas Children’s Hospital before moving to Cleveland.
As a scholar, educator, and clinical ethicist, she is dedicated to addressing sources of vulnerability and inequity in health care. Her research focuses on disability bioethics, psychiatric ethics, the nature of vulnerability in clinical settings, and the interaction between institutional structures and agency. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she contributed to institutional, state-level, and national projects regarding triage and other pressing ethical issues. She has published in The Journal of Clinical Ethics, Hastings Center Report, Nursing Ethics, AMA Journal of Ethics, Journal of Medical Ethics, and other venues. She contributed to chapters to several anthologies, including The Disability Bioethics Reader, eds. Joel Michael Reynolds and Christine Wieseler (Routledge, 2022). She co-authored Basics of Bioethics, Fourth Edition with Robert M. Veatch (Routledge, 2020) and co-edited Moral Expertise: New Essays from Theoretical and Clinical Bioethics (Springer, 2018) with Jamie Carlin Watson and Applying Nonideal Theory to Bioethics: Living and Dying in a Nonideal World (Springer, 2021) with Elizabeth Victor.
She is a member of ClinicPride and DEI Council at Cleveland Clinic, and she and her colleagues received a Cleveland Clinic Advancing Interprofessional Learning Grant focused on inclusive communication for LGBTQ+ patient populations. In 2024, she became a Cleveland Clinic Simulation Research Fellow to develop sim-based education focus on clinical ethics and anti-ableism. She served on the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) Program Committee, co-founded the ASBH Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Affinity Group, and co-led the ASBH Disability Ethics Affinity Group.