A public health professor is bringing the National Bioethics Bowl to Pitt

Do you have opinions about AI in medicine? What about cloning pets? Could you hold your own in a debate about living robots or the cost of precision therapies?

Those are just a few of the topics students will consider this April in the 2026 National Bioethics Bowl, an annual tournament where competitors debate difficult issues in medicine, biotechnology and health care. The event will be hosted by Pitt and sponsored by the School of Public Health and the Institute for Bioethics.

"These bioethics topics are emerging as quickly as technology is developing, and they're things that we really need to grapple with," said Cindy McCarthy, an associate professor in the School of Public Health and this year's bowl organizer. "They're difficult conversations, they're complex, they're multifaceted."

McCarthy is the faculty advisor and coach for the bioethics bowl club, a team of students who practice to compete in the annual competition. The team takes months to prepare for the tournament, discussing the year's case studies and developing arguments.

These conversations play important roles in the students' intellectual development, McCarthy explained. For one, they serve as practice listening to and engaging with perspectives far different from one's own, no matter how charged the topic may feel. And there's also the future to think of. When McCarthy talks to her students about their careers, she implores them to think about the impact of artificial intelligence in medicine - not necessarily to adopt those tools, but to consider the place humans will have in a health care system that appears poised to become more automated.

"You need to figure out what about being a great physician or a great health care provider can't be done by a computer," McCarthy said. "And it's empathy and listening skills and the ability to take in all of the nuances of a particular situation."

McCarthy herself decided to devote her career to health care as an undergraduate, and she later had some negative experiences with the health system. Rather than drive her away from the field, it hardened her resolve to make the industry better, and she went on to earn a doctorate in the field of health care ethics from Duquesne University.

"I'd always wanted to be in health care, but what I thought I could do was teach health care providers how to better interact with their patients," she said.

McCarthy is now a core faculty member in Pitt's new Institute for Bioethics and serves as director of the School of Public Health's bioethics certificate program - and for years, students came to her looking for more opportunities to engage with topics that weren't being covered in class. So she became the faculty advisor for the bioethics bowl club, which has now been competing for three years.

As organizer of the bowl, her role this year also included finding 30 experts in health care, ethics, history and philosophy of science, and more from across the region to judge the competition. She also needed to find writers to tackle case studies that cover a range of timely topics.

This year, students from 20 universities will compete in the bowl, including teams from Rice University, Georgetown University and Stanford University. It's a chance to build strong relationships, share respectful debates and participate in Pitt's tradition of advancing health and biology.

"Pitt has a longstanding history of being a pioneer in many facets of medicine, like our pioneering different kinds of transplants," McCarthy said. "And now as leaders in AI and medicine, it's really important that Pitt acknowledges the complexity of bioethics cases and situations, and really sets the standard for other institution."

This year's roster of competitors is set, but students interested in joining the team can email cindy.mccarthy[at] pitt.edu(Cindy McCarthy)or reach out through the team's website.

Photography by Tom Altany