The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Bioethics Academy (SNFBA), which aims to expand awareness of the field in Greece, is widening its reach with its first train-the-trainer program. The workshop, held this month at the Goulandris Natural History Museum in Athens, brought together around 60 professionals whose work has a teaching component relevant to bioethics, including university and medical school faculty.
The two-day convening covered high-level topics like informed consent and research ethics, as well as practical insights on how case studies, apps, and videos can be used in bioethics education. They were taught by instructors including program co-directors Jeffrey Kahn, the Andreas C. Dracopoulos Director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, and Effy Vayena, Head of the Health Ethics and Policy Lab at ETH Zurich.
Organized through a partnership between these two institutions with support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) in 2019, the core of the SNFBA has been an intensive Foundations of Bioethics course, held most recently in Athens in April. In 2024, a major additional SNF grant made possible a significant expansion of the program, adding the new train-the-trainer component, advanced topics courses, and programming to reinforce bioethics networks across Greece.
To this end, the evening between the two days of the recent workshop featured a networking event for alumni of the bioethics program. A special presentation by a Greek pediatric infectious disease professor discussed the “Ethics of the Vaccination of Pregnant Women.”
So far, more than 250 professionals in Greece have taken part in SNFBA programs, a number that continues to grow as the program expands to reach professionals at different stages of their career in new ways, including through regular mini-conferences and individualized mentorship.