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Read the Full Report!

We are enthusiastic to submit this report chronicling the Petrie-Flom Center’s first operational year of activities. While we will not be at full staffing until the rest of our crew of fellows join in September, the many achievements the Center has experienced thus far are widespread, and excitement about our mission is palpable. The Center has attracted attention at Harvard and beyond, engaging leading intellectuals from all across the country in fields at the intersection of health and law. Through the Center’s variety of programs and initiatives, we have demonstrated significant success toward our mission to foster the development of a new generation of promising scholars who will play a key role in defining the growth of the field of health law.

The most notable and exciting advances of the Center’s first year have been those made in our research and fellowship programs. The Center has succeeded in developing, fostering, and establishing a home to a community of the finest scholars dedicated to research in the fields of health law. Without the support from the Center, many of its affiliated scholars would not have focused their work on issues of health law policy and bioethics as much as they have. These programs have thus been very successful in achieving its goal of getting top minds to focus on this field, where they otherwise might not have.

By definition, the nature of the Center’s work is interdisciplinary and cuts across traditional academic disciplines, engaging the attention of scholars and practitioners to explore and define the complex challenges at the intersection of health and law. Driven by the Center’s programmatic component and participation in activities undertaken in collaboration with a number of Harvard University programs and student groups, we have established strong links to programs and individuals throughout the university. The interdisciplinary nature of the fields addressed by the Center’s core initiatives necessitates strong links and wide reaching collaboration with colleagues in various fields from within Harvard Law School and from across the University. The workshop, conferences and events program in this first year has helped to establish the Center as a local hub of intellectual debate and a source of information about critical issues concerning health law, policy, biotechnology and ethics. We expect that our future programming will continue to serve this role, and will expand to draw even wider national attention to the Center’s leading role as a forum for non-partisan, intellectual debate about these issues.

Read the Full Report!