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
Michael’s research focuses predominantly on ethical questions in health and social care practice, policy, and law. He has a particular interest in ethical challenges that arise in the care of people situated at the margins of our societies: those with chronic physical and mental illnesses, older adults with cognitive impairment, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and transgender people. For over 20 years, Michael has also been critically analysing the ethical and legal aspects of decision-making within adult caregiving relationships.
His work is interdisciplinary, integrating philosophical, legal and qualitative social scientific methods of analysis. This approach has also motivated methodological scholarship, which has scrutinised the nature and purpose of bioethical inquiry, and has had a significant impact on shaping the sub-field of empirical bioethics.
Michael has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, authored or edited 6 books, and secured more than S$8.5 million in competitive grants to support over 20 different research projects.
EDUCATION
Michael is an experienced university teacher, particularly in health professional education. As Director of Education at CBmE, he provides strategic leadership across the Centre’s diverse educational portfolio. He also leads CBmE’s undergraduate programme in health ethics, law and professionalism, delivered over 5 years to nearly 3,000 medical, dental, pharmacy and nursing students at NUS at any one time.
He contributes to postgraduate education across NUS Medicine, teaching courses on the foundations and methods of bioethics, the ethics of ageing, and AI and health data ethics. He has supervised 13 PhD students in bioethics, law and psychiatry, and has received university awards recognising the quality of his supervision. 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 holds a number of senior service roles across academic, regulatory, and professional bodies. He is a member of the Agency for Integrated Care’s IRB, 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. At NUS Medicine, he serves on several committees, including the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, the Faculty Promotion and Tenure Committee (FPTC), and the Professional Standards and Conduct Committee (PSCC) for medical students, which he also chairs.
He is an Associate Faculty member at the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, where he worked for over a decade before joining NUS. He has also 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.