Nurse-Bioethicist Christine Grady Returns to Her Georgetown Roots

(March 24, 2026) - Christine Grady, RN, PhD, FAAN (N'74, G'93), an alumna who has built her career exploring the ethics of biomedical research, has returned to the Hilltop - a place where she has deep academic and personal roots.

Grady started March 1 in a dual capacity: serving as senior advisor to the Executive Vice President for Health Sciences on bioethics and neuroethics, and as a professor of neuroscience in the School of Medicine. She holds a secondary appointment in Georgetown's College of Arts & Sciences, a co-appointment as a research scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and is a faculty member of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics. She will also work closely with Berkley School of Nursing faculty to collaborate and amplify bioethics and clinical scholarly output.

Grady's arrival represents the next chapter in the evolution of a career that has unfolded at the intersection of scientific research, philosophy and human dignity.

A member of the National Academy of Medicine, Grady most recently served as the chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, a position she left in 2025 after more than three decades at the institution. In that role, she became one of the defining voices of American bioethics - shaping national policy on everything from informed consent to the ethics of vaccine development during COVID-19.

A 'Full-Circle' Moment

After earning her B.S. in nursing and biology from Georgetown in 1974, Grady held several nursing positions before completing her master's degree in community health nursing at Boston College. She then spent two years as a nurse in Brazil with Project HOPE, a humanitarian NGO. Grady joined the NIH in the early 1980s and, while working full-time and raising three children, returned to Georgetown to earn her doctorate in philosophy in 1993.

Georgetown's PhD program in philosophy "was perfect for me," Grady said, as it brought her closer to the ethical questions that she had encountered in her nursing practice and opened her eyes to the possibility of a career in bioethics. She was also attracted to the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, which was established at Georgetown in 1971.

"I continued to work at the NIH during my studies and found opportunities to connect studying philosophy with caring for ill patients," she said.

Her Georgetown roots run deeper still. She and her husband, Anthony S. Fauci, MD, were married in Dahlgren Chapel in 1985, and their three children were born at Georgetown University Hospital. Fauci joined Georgetown's faculty as a Distinguished University Professor in 2023.

Returning as a faculty member, she says, feels less like an arrival than a homecoming.

"It feels fitting to be coming back - like completing a full circle," Grady said. "Georgetown is an incredible institution, and I'm hoping I can make meaningful contributions here."

Taking the Non-Linear Path

Grady says her career path is one that resists easy categorization, and she wouldn't have it any other way.

"Opportunities came up for me that I never could have predicted. I learned they can open up a whole new horizon of things to learn and contribute to," she said. "I feel like I've been lucky to be in certain places at the right time, but I've also jumped on the opportunities that came my way."

She gives the same advice to students: "Yes, it's important to plan - but be ready to pivot and take advantage of what comes across your path."

At the NIH, Grady built a distinguished record on the ethics of clinical research as well as the ethical challenges facing nurses and other health care clinicians.

She began her NIH career as a clinical nurse specialist in allergy, immunology and infectious diseases, with a major focus on HIV/AIDs, before moving to the bioethics department, which at the time she applied had just two people. She ultimately rose to lead the department, and over time watched it grow into a "thriving, productive bioethics department with a competitive fellows training program, a robust ethics consult service, and some cutting-edge bioethics research."

Grady's scholarship has centered on some of the most fundamental questions in biomedical ethics, including how to protect people who participate in research, what it means to give informed consent, and how clinicians navigate moral complexity in practice.

She served on the President's Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues from 2010 to 2017, has written or edited major works, including "The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics"and"The Search for an AIDS Vaccine: Ethical Issues in the Development and Testing of a Preventive HIV Vaccine," and has published more than 200 papers.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was a prominent voice on the ethical dimensions of vaccine development, resource allocation, and the disproportionate burden borne by nurses. These accomplishments earned her the NIH Director's Award in 2021.

It is that combination of scientific rigor and philosophical depth that makes her arrival a significant moment for Georgetown, according to Norman J. Beauchamp, MD, MHS, executive vice president for health sciences. He said Grady embodies the principle of magis - service to the universal good, as the pace and promise of medical discovery accelerates faster than ever.

"As a world-renowned nurse-bioethicist and former leader at the NIH, Christine brings a perspective that is as rare as it is vital," Beauchamp said. "Her background in nursing provides a unique, hands-on lens - one that ensures ethical policy is always rooted in the lived experience of the patient and the clinician."

Beauchamp added that "bringing a leader of Dr. Grady's caliber into our community is a powerful activation of Georgetown's rich, storied history in bioethics."

Delving Into the Hard Questions

Now Grady is turning her attention to what she sees as the next frontier: neuroethics.

Neurotechnologies like brain stimulation devices and tools that can decode human thought, often lauded for the promise they hold for people living with devastating neurological conditions, also raise profound ethical questions about identity, autonomy and the potential for misuse.

These are the kinds of questions Georgetown is uniquely positioned to engage, Grady said.

"I love the opportunities for collaboration that Georgetown brings," Grady said. "Being in a place where hard science converges with philosophy, the humanities and clinical work - all the things that make ethics so rich and so necessary - that's where I want to be."

Grady has long been animated by the belief that bioethics is not a brake on science but rather a complement to it. She is concerned about declining public trust in science and in universities, and believes that we should be leaning toward - and not shying away from - good-faith engagement with hard questions.

She sees Georgetown, with its commitment to the principle of cura personalis, as a natural leader in that conversation.

Grady embraces the challenges ahead, and is particularly looking forward to teaching. At the NIH, Grady ran a fellowship program that brought in post-baccalaureate scholars straight out of college. She recalls that working alongside those young researchers was among the most rewarding parts of her tenure there. She is hoping to build on this experience at Georgetown through her undergraduate teaching role, helping students dive into the ethical considerations that are core to discovery. "Bioethics is one of those topics that affects everyone," she said. "So my hope is that students will get as excited about these questions as I do, and that they gain the tools to debate them among themselves as they go out into their professions."