Chloë FitzGerald

My research interests lie at the intersection of moral psychology, ethical theory, and bioethics, with a focus on automaticity, dual process theories of cognition, implicit bias and stereotypes, emotions and moral intuitions.

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow on the Swiss National Science Foundation project, ‘Understanding implicit bias in clinical care’, with Primary Investigator Samia Hurst. We are conducting empirical research into the presence of implicit bias in physicians and testing interventions that might reduce these biases. Before that, I was a postdoctoral fellow for a year on the biomedical ethics project 'ENABLE - Protecting Vulnerable People in Health Care', also headed by Samia Hurst at iEH2. We conducted a systematic literature review on the presence of implicit bias in health care professionals, which provided a basis for our current empirical work.

From September 2011 - September 2012, I was a postdoctoral fellow on the CIHR-funded interdisciplinary project, ‘Let conscience be their guide? Conscientious refusals in reproductive health care’. I was supervised by Carolyn McLeod in the Philosophy department of the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

In 2011, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l'Université de Montréal (CRÉUM) for 9 months, where I worked with Christine Tappolet, who was my supervisor, but also Daniel Weinstock, the director of CRÉUM, among others.

I defended my PhD thesis, ‘Moral intuitions: what they are and how we should use them’, at the University of Manchester in March 2011. The PhD was funded by the Wellcome Trust and I was supervised by Peter Goldie and Jonathan Quong. I analysed recent empirical and philosophical work on emotion and moral judgement to provide an accurate descriptive picture of the phenomena involved in moral intuition.