Shannon Hanson, PhD

Prof. Hanson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, and the Director of Graduate Studies for the MS in Bioethics and Medical Humanities. She teaches and publishes in the areas of theories of medical ethics, research ethics, and end-of-life care and death and dying. She received her BA from Rice University in Houston, her PhD from Georgetown University in DC, and post-doctoral training at the University of Louisville.
 
Prof. Hanson has difficulty saying “no” to work, and consequently she is a member of Tulane’s IRBs, the ethics committee at East Jefferson Hospital, attends palliative medicine huddles weekly, and teaches in the School of Medicine and on the Uptown campus in addition to her full time job with the MS. She has given talks for the medical library on research ethics in connection with the traveling Frankenstein exhibit (conclusion: Young Frankenstein is morally better than Victor Frankenstein), preventive ethics in disasters, public health and society, and publication ethics with regard to immorally derived data. She has recently managed to say no to one request made of her, but she’s really considering going back and rethinking that decision.
 
These opportunities and experiences have allowed Prof. Hanson to gain valuable clinical and practical experience that has really changed how she views medical ethics and the importance of practical experiential knowledge. This has led some of her colleagues in philosophy, a discipline in which atheists can happily create arguments for the existence of God and in which otherwise apparently sane people can argue that it is quite possible that nothing actually exists and then have lunch, to sometimes look askance at her, as she seems to “care” what the “practical results” of the “theories she espouses” would be.