Julian Savulescu
Director
Profile
Professor Julian Savulescu is an award-winning ethicist, medical doctor and moral philosopher. He trained in neuroscience, medicine, and philosophy. He is currently and has been Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford since 2002. He currently also holds Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor in Medical Ethics, and Director of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (from August 2022).
In 2003, he founded the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and was responsible for attracting a GBP100 million donation from the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education to evolve the Centre into the Uehiro Oxford Institute (the largest single donation Oxford has received). He is also responsible for enabling a gift of GBP 10 million to St Cross College from the Uehiro Foundation for scholarships in practical ethics.
He co-directs the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities and is Co-PI on ANTITHESES – A Discovery Platform for Transformative Inclusivity in Ethics and Humanities Research funded by Wellcome Trust (2025-2030). He is a Distinguished Visiting Professorial Fellow at Murdoch Children’s Research institute (MCRI) and Distinguished International Visiting Professor in Law at Melbourne Law School since 2017.
He was editor of the BMJ’s Journal of Medical Ethics for over 10 years and achieved the highest impact factor in the journal’s history.
He leads teams of >30 researchers and has held over £23 million in awards and donations under his direct leadership, as part of awards worth over £32 million.
Google Scholar is the best metric for medical ethics, He has an overall h index of 92, with over 33,341 citations in total and 455 publications cited at least 10 times (accurate as of Sept 2024).
Scholar GPS is a Californian company linked to Meta that ranks academic institutions, disciplines, fields and scholars. It uses AI and deep learning. (scholargps.com/scholars/79560527908615/julian-savulescu). In 2024, Savulescu was ranked No 1 in the world in medical ethics (from 12,206); No 1 in the world in bioethics; No 3 in ethics (from 116,215), in the world for all time. He is ranked No 27 in Public Health in last 5 years (from 414,738). He was ranked in top 0.02% of 30 million scholars for all time and top 0.01% in the last 5 years, from 15 million scholars. He was ranked No 7 of all scholars at the University of Oxford in the last 5 years. It lists over 650 publications.
In 2023, Stanford University – Elsevier’s top 2% of all scholars worldwide for 2022 included him.
He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, Monash University Distinguished Alumnus, received an honorary doctorate from Bucharest.
NUS Discovery profile: https://discovery.nus.edu.sg/18430-julian-savulescu/about
Research
Genethics
He has led debate on predictive testing, abortion, cloning, stem cells, genetic selection, mitochondrial transfer, chimeras, organoids, polygenic scores. He coined the term “Procreative Beneficence” in 2001 (1192 citations, 5 reprints/ translations)[1]. He is world leader on gene editing and enhancement. The Ethics of Germline Gene Editing [10] (178 citations, German translation) informed 2018 NHMRC policy, quoted throughout Senate report.
Neuroethics
In 27 papers and his book [2] (767 citations, 4 translations), he established the field of moral bioenhancement, inspiring books, research, conferences globally.
Research ethics
Savulescu repositioned research ethics’ role in facilitating research. He argued “research ethics committees are behaving unethically” by not requiring systematic reviews and perpetuating publication bias [6]. He contributed to reduction of research waste (Lancet). Analysing Jesse Gelsinger’s 1999 death [7] and He Jiankui’s repetition, he introduced concept of minimizing expected harm. This approach is the basis of novel gene therapy guidance at Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne. Savulescu led debate on ethics of placebo-controlled surgical trials [5].
Clinical and Paediatric Ethics
Savulescu leads clinical ethics debates. He was primary commentator (5 articles, 25 media pieces) on Charlie Gard. He created ethical algorithms to employ experimental therapy and resolve conflict (Lancet) culminating in BMA President’s Choice, Ethics, conflict and medical treatment for children [3]. Rethinking Conscientious Objection forthcoming (OUP).
Public Health Ethics
Savulescu led pandemic ethical debate (33 articles, >70 international media pieces). He published ethical algorithms on allocating life-saving resources (BJA), vaccines, coercion, incentives [4]. He wrote first Challenge Study guidelines, including on ethics of payment [8] (37 citations). Edited Pandemic Ethics (OUP).
Current and recent research grants
Chen Su Lan Research Funding. Chen Su Lan Trust. SGD480,000. Principal Investigator. 2022-2025
NUS Start Up Grant. Collective Reflective Equilibrium and Algorithmic Bioethics in Medical Ethics. SGD 2,000,000. Principal Investigator. 2022-2026.
Social Science Research Council: Social Science Research Thematic Grant Type B, “CREPSING: “Collective Reflective Equilibrium in Practice in Singapore.” S$3,254,342 (about $2,481,296 USD). Principal Investigator, 2024-2029.
AI Singapore (AISG) Governance Programme. AISG3-GV-2023-012. “Developing a Trust Framework for Artificial Intelligence in Emergency Healthcare.” SGD599,950. Principal Investigator. 2024-2027.
Wellcome Trust – Wellcome Discovery. ANTITHESES: A Discovery Platform for Transformative Inclusivity in Ethics and Humanities Research. SGD 1,094,644. Co-Principal Investigator. 2024-2029.
Selected Publications
Savulescu, J. (2001). ‘Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children’. Bioethics. 15 (5): 413-426.
Savulescu, J., Persson, I. (2012) Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement. Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilkinson, D., and Savulescu, J., (2018). Ethics, conflict and medical treatment for children: From disagreement to dissensus. Elsevier [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537987/]
Savulescu, J., Pugh, J. & Wilkinson, D. (2021) Balancing incentives and disincentives for vaccination in a pandemic. Nature Medicine 27, 1500–1503. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01466-8
Savulescu, J*, Wartolowska, K*, Carr.A, (2016) Randomised placebo-controlled trials of surgery – ethical analysis and guidelines. Journal of Medical Ethics 42: 776-783. http://jme.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/medethics-2015-103333 *joint first authors
Savulescu, J., Chalmers, I., and Blunt, J. (1996). ‘Are Research Ethics Committees Behaving Unethically? Some Suggestions for Improving Performance and Accountability’. British Medical Journal. 313: 1390-3.
Savulescu, J.(2001). ‘Harm, Ethics Committees and the Gene Therapy Death’. Journal of Medical Ethics. 27: 148-150.
Grimwade, O., Savulescu, J., Giubilini, A., Oakley, J., Osowicki, J., Pollard, A., Nussberger, A.M. (2020). Payment in Challenge Studies: Ethics, Attitudes and a New Payment for Risk Model [Feature Article]. Journal of Medical Ethics 46:815-826.
White, B., Willmott, L., Savulescu, J.,(2014) Voluntary Palliated Starvation: A Lawful and Ethical Way to Die? Journal of Law and Medicine 22: 276-286.
Gyngell, C. Douglas, T. Savulescu, J. (2017). The Ethics of Germline Gene Editing. Journal of Applied Philosophy 34(4):498-513. doi: 10.1111/japp.12249.
Committee Memberships, Editorial Board Memberships and other service roles or affiliations
Julian serves as a member of several committees and panels to advise on ethics matters:
- Bioethics Advisory Committee (BAC)
- BAC’s Human Nuclear Genome Editing (HNGE) Review Group
- BAC’s Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (BDAI) Review Group
- BAC’s Genetic and Genomic Testing and Research (GGTR) Review Group
- National Medical Ethics Committee
- Healthcare Ethics Capability Committee
- Trusted Research/Real World-Data Utilisation and Sharing Tech (TRUST) Data Access Committee (DAC) Committee
