Joel Reynolds
Bridging inquiry across the humanities, social sciences, and medical practice, Dr. Reynolds research explores foundational issues in ethics with a special focus on identifying, mitigating, and eliminating health inequities faced by disabled people.
Bridging inquiry across the humanities, social sciences, and medical practice, Dr. Reynolds' research explores foundational issues in ethics with a special focus on identifying, mitigating, and eliminating health inequities faced by disabled people. Their work seeks health justice as rooted in methods that (i) prioritize first-person data (phenomenology, ethnography, and other qualitative approaches) and that (ii) center the lived experience of historically marginalized and oppressed groups.
Joel Michael Reynolds (PhD, MA) is Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies, and Director of the Disability Studies Program at Georgetown University. They are also Faculty in the Department of Family Medicine as well as the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University School of Medicine and Medical Center, Senior Bioethics Advisor to the Hastings Center, and Faculty Scholar of the Greenwall Foundation. Since 2021, Dr. Reynolds has been a Visiting Lecturer in Bioethics at the Yale School of Medicine, and they are the 2023-24 Visiting Professor in Critical Care Ethics and Decision-Making at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Reynolds is the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, & Society, both of which they co-edit. In recognition of the impact of their scholarship, they were named an Honorary Fellow of the McLaughlin College of Public Policy at York University in 2022 and elected as a Fellow of The Hastings Center in 2023.
Based on their 2018 AMA Journal of Ethics article, “Three Things Clinicians Should Know About Disability,” Dr. Reynolds regularly speaks with and consults for medical educators across specialties concerning how to improve the quality and equity of care for patients with disabilities, including recent talks at the schools of medicine at Yale, Harvard, Tufts, University of Washington, UCLA, and Oakland University, and for grand rounds in the USA and Canada, including Brown University’s Department of Emergency Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, Hackensack Meridian Health, University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Critical Care, Horizon Health Network, Parkland Health & Hospital System, and University of Texas Medical Branch. An internationally recognized expert on disability bioethics, they have given 100+ lectures, keynote addresses, and conference talks at universities and medical schools across the globe, including recent and upcoming international talks at the University of Southern Denmark, University of Lyon (France), University of Basel (Switzerland), Universidad de La Salle (Columbia), Middle East Technical University (Turkey), University of Otago (New Zealand/Aotearoa), University of Barcelona (Spain), Monash University (Australia), and Toronto Metropolitan University (Canada). Dr. Reynolds also advises and provides expert testimony for legal teams in the USA and Canada on disability discrimination and disability rights cases.
Reynolds is the author or co-author of over 60 publications spanning philosophy, biomedical ethics, and public health as well as author or co-editor of 6 books including The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), The Disability Bioethics Reader (Routledge, 2022), Disability Justice in Public Health Emergencies (Routledge, 2024), The Meaning of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2025), and Philosophy of Disability: An Introduction (Polity, 2026). Their article-length work appears in leading journals across multiple fields, including The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, Episteme, Journal of Medical Ethics, The Hastings Center Report, JAMA Health Forum, Biological Psychiatry, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Neuroethics, Critical Philosophy of Race, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and Chiasmi International: Contemporary Phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty Studies. Current research includes a multi-year, externally funded project from The Greenwall Foundation on the relationship between concepts of disability and health measures such as quality of life as well as book chapters for volumes including Philosophical Foundations of Disability Law, Methods in Medical Ethics, The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, The Oxford Handbook of Genetic Counseling, and The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology.
Reynolds is regularly interviewed by journalists in outlets including NPR, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. Their public scholarship includes pieces in TIME, AEON, The Conversation, Health Progress, The Bioethics Forum, The Philosopher, and a Tedx talk. Dr. Reynolds’ work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Greenwall Foundation. They earned a B.A. in Philosophy as well as in Religious Studies from the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Emory University. They previously held the inaugural Rice Family Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioethics and the Humanities at The Hastings Center from 2017-2020 and the inaugural Laney Disability Studies Fellowship at Emory University from 2014-15. You can reach Dr. Reynolds (they/he) by email at joel.reynolds@georgetown.edu