Dr Carleigh Krubiner

Carleigh Krubiner started with the mechanics of health systems.

At Results for Development, she worked on health financing, universal health coverage and the global AIDS response – looking at questions such as how benefits are designed, how treatments are funded and how limited resources can be used most effectively. Her work included projects in South Africa and Cambodia and research feeding into models of the economic returns from HIV treatment.

But questions about resources quickly lead to questions about fairness.

At Johns Hopkins, Krubiner pursued a PhD in Health Policy and Management, specialising in Bioethics and Health Policy. Her dissertation examined conditional cash transfer programmes – not simply whether they worked, but when it is ethically defensible to make support dependent on particular behaviours.

That question – who gets to set the terms? – has followed her work ever since.

At the Berman Institute of Bioethics and later the Center for Global Development, she worked on the ethics of healthcare priority-setting, equitable access to vaccines and the inclusion of pregnant people in biomedical research. Through the PREVENT project, she helped develop guidance arguing that pregnancy should not automatically be a reason to exclude people from vaccine research – because exclusion can create its own risks and inequalities.

Today, she leads bioethics at Wellcome, bringing ethical thinking into work spanning discovery research, infectious disease, mental health and climate and health. Her role is not to put ethics at the end of the scientific process as a final check, but to bring those questions into the decisions being made from the start.

Science can tell us what is possible.

Krubiner’s work asks who it is possible for – and whether that is fair.