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Contact Details

Phone
64 3 471 6127
Email
grant.gillett@otago.ac.nz

University Links

Position
Professor of Biomedical Ethics
Department
Bioethics Centre
Qualifications
MSc MB ChB(Auck) DPhil(Oxf) FRACS FRSNZ
Research summary
Psychiatry, philosophy, and neuroscience
Teaching

I teach in Early learning in medicine, cognitive neuroscience, and graduate papers in Bioethics.

Memberships
  • Fellow of the Royal Society
  • Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Psychiatrists
  • Fellow of The Hastings Center

Research

My research ranges quite widely in Bioethics, philosophy, and neuroscience. In Bioethics I work on end of life care, complementary and alternative medicine, autonomy, and the patient's journey. In Neuroethics I have written widely on brain birth, brain death, PVS, and minimally conscious states, and issues of free will identity and responsibility.

My work in neuroethics arose from research in Philosophy of psychiatry focusing on the nature of mental disorder, psychopathy, and dissociative disorders. I examine these topics through Post-structuralist philosophy, an exploration of the patient's voice, post-colonialism, and human subjectivity and I have authored Subjectivity and being somebody: neuroethics and human identity, Bioethics in the Clinic (Johns Hopkins University Press) The mind and its discontents (Oxford Univ Press) Reasonable Care (Bristol Press), Representation, Meaning and Thought (Oxford University Press) and co-authored The Discursive Mind (Sage) as well as numerous articles in a variety of international journals such as Philosophy, British Medical Journal, Lancet, Philosophical Psychology, Inquiry, Mind, Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of medicine and Philosophy, Consciousness and cognition, Brain, Philosophy, psychiatry and psychology, and Bioethics.

Publications

Gillett, G. (2008). Subjectivity and being somebody: Human identity and Neuroethics. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 286p. Authored Book - Research

Gillett, G. (2009). Intention, autonomy, and brain events. Bioethics, 23(6), 330-339. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2009.01726.x Journal - Research Article

Franz, E. A., & Gillett, G. (2011). John Hughlings Jackson's evolutionary neurology: A unifying framework for cognitive neuroscience. Brain, 134, 3114-3120. doi: 10.1093/brain/awr218 Journal - Research Article

Gillett, G. R., Honeybul, S., Ho, K. M., & Lind, C. R. P. (2010). Neurotrauma and the RUB: Where tragedy meets ethics and science. Journal of Medical Ethics, 36, 727-730. doi: 10.1136/jme.2010.037424 Journal - Research Article

Gillett, G. (2009). The mind and its discontents (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press, 432p. Authored Book - Research

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