Ethics and Humanitarian Research:
Generating Evidence Ethically

25–26 March 2019

The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA

Fawcett Event Center, 2400 Olentangy River Road, Columbus, OH 43210

Audiovisual presentations are available at https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/87554

PREA Twitter is @Ethics_Analysis and the conference hashtag is: #PREAconference

Disasters and conflicts lead to crises that call for humanitarian responses. Evidence is required to ensure these responses are effective and the best use of available resources. Such research and evidence-generating activities often involve human participants and thus raise ethical issues. Practical tools and decision-making aids are needed to help researchers and others gathering data in humanitarian settings to address the ethical issues. Consequently, researchers, policy-makers, and ethicists are engaging in a new field of inquiry concerning the ethical implications of humanitarian research. This conference brought together researchers, ethicists and other humanitarian actors from five continents to consider the ethical challenges encountered in research and other evidence-generating activities in humanitarian settings. The conference included a structured conversation about humanitarian health research ethics as part of The Ohio State University’s 2019 series, Conversations About Research Ethics.

Hosted by The Ohio State University Center for Bioethics and the PREA Project

Conference Program

Posters on display

Hotel Information

The conference was hosted by the PREA research project and OSU’s Center for Bioethics. Conference organizer: Dónal O’Mathúna, PI for PREA, Associate Professor, College of Nursing, The Ohio State University, 760 Kinnear Road, Columbus, Ohio 43212. For further information or with questions, email roberts.1600@osu.edu.

The Post-Research Ethics Analysis (PREA) project has been examining ethical issues in humanitarian research since 2016. Funded by R2HC/Elrha, it has reviewed the ethical issues published in the literature and conducted interviews with researchers conducting humanitarian research in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nepal and South Sudan. These have contributed to a practical tool to help research teams reflect on and learn from the ethical issues encountered in humanitarian research. The results of this research and the tool will be presented at this conference, along with other oral presentations, and structured panel conversations between humanitarian researchers, ethicists and policy-makers.

Keynote Speakers

• Veena Pillai, MBBS, M.Sc.,
  Physician and Researcher, Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia;
  Director of Dhi Consulting & Training, Malaysia
• Matthew Hunt, Ph.D.,
  Associate Professor and Director of Research, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada;
  Co-Director of the Humanitarian Health Ethics Network
• Elysée Nouvet, Ph.D.,
  Assistant Professor, The Africa Institute, Western University, Ontario, Canada
• Nir Eyal, Ph.D.,
  Associate Professor of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, USA
• Tine Van Bortel, Ph.D.,
  Professor of Global & Mental Health, University of East London, UK;
  Deputy Director of the Institute of Health & Human Development