Nancy Berlinger PhD

Nancy Berlinger is a Senior Research Scholar at The Hastings Center. Her interdisciplinary research explores ethical and social challenges arising from population aging, a demographic shift toward longer lives and smaller families. Its goal is to help researchers, professionals, and members of the public think together about common challenges facing aging societies like the United States, with attention to foundational questions: What does it mean to live a good life in later life? And how should we live together in aging societies?.

Berlinger’s Bioethics for Aging Societies research portfolio includes work on dementia, family caregiving, health care decision-making, housing, and technology.  A cross-cutting theme of this research is how cultural narratives convey ideas and values about aging in ways that shape individual experiences and societal investments. It has been supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Retirement Research Foundation for Aging, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Robert W. Wilson Charitable Trust.  Berlinger also has longstanding research interests in problems of safety and harm in health care; ethics guidance for health care practitioners in end-of-life and crisis conditions, and immigrant health.

Berlinger founded and directs The Hastings Center’s Sadler Scholars program for advanced doctoral students and early-career bioethics researchers. She received her BA in English and history from Smith College, her PhD in English from the University of Glasgow, and an MDiv from Union Theological Seminary, with a concentration in social ethics. She traces her orientation toward real-world challenges to human health and flourishing to her first job, in an HIV/AIDS service organization before the advent of effective antiretroviral therapies.