Michael Dunn
Associate Professor
Profile
Dr Michael Dunn is an Associate Professor and the Director of Education at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics (CBmE) in the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.
RESEARCH
The majority of Michael’s current research projects examine ethical questions within health and social care practice, policy and law. In these projects, he focuses mostly on community-based and long-term care settings, and he has a particular interest in the care and treatment provided to people with chronic illnesses, mental illnesses, age-related cognitive impairments, and intellectual and developmental disabilities. For the past 20 years, Michael has also been analysing the ethical and legal dimensions of decision-making within adult caregiving relationships – in the contexts of family life, professional care, and the judicial system.
Michael adopts interdisciplinary methodologies in his research, deploying and integrating philosophical, legal and qualitative social scientific methods of analysis. Taking this approach has also motivated methodological scholarship that has had a significant impact on the sub-field of empirical bioethics, and that has scrutinised the nature and purpose of bioethics research more generally.
Michael has written more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, authored or edited 6 books, and obtained over S$6m in competitive research grants.
EDUCATION
Michael is an experienced university teacher, particularly in health professional education settings. In his role as Director of Education at CBmE, he has strategic oversight over the direction and content of the diverse educational portfolio within the Centre. As a part of this role, Michael leads CBmE’s undergraduate programme in health ethics, law and professionalism, which is delivered over 5 years and is now responsible for educating close to 3,000 medical, dental, pharmacy and nursing students within NUS at any one time.
Michael contributes to postgraduate education across NUS Medicine, teaching courses in the theory and methodology of bioethics, the ethical dimensions of ageing, and AI and health data ethics. He has supervised 14 PhD students in bioethics, law and psychiatry, and has been acknowledged for the quality of his graduate supervision in university teaching awards. He also leads ‘refresher’ workshops in ethical skills for local health professionals as part of CBmE’s Continuing Education and Training (CET) programmes.
SERVICE AND BACKGROUND
Michael is a member of the Agency for Integrated Care’s IRB, the Co-Lead of the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law’s Empirical Bioethics Stream, and an Editorial Board member of four bioethics and ageing journals. Michael also serves on various committees within NUS Medicine. This includes the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, the Associate Professorial Faculty Promotion and Tenure Committee (FPTC), and the Professional Standards and Conduct Committee (PSCC) for medical students, which he also chairs.
Michael is an associate faculty member at the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, where he worked for over a decade before joining NUS. He has previously held visiting academic positions in Japan, Hong Kong, the USA, the Netherlands and Norway.
Michael obtained his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of Cambridge in the UK.
To view my complete list of publications, please view my NUS Discovery page.
My full CV is available here.