Heidi Matisonn

After a short stint in advertising and an even shorter stint as a political speechwriter, I left South Africa in 2002 to undertake doctoral studies at the London School of Economics. I joined the University of Kwazulu Natal in 2007 and remained there until 2022 when I moved to the University of Cape Town's EthicsLab, based in the Department of Medicine and Neuroscience Institute. While my training is in moral and political philosophy, my interests also include research ethics and the ethics of new and emerging health technologies.

The central theme of my work is to think and enact care in the context of the academy. As a philosopher, this means conceptualising and understanding ‘care’ as an essential component of what makes us human. As an academic teacher, this means thinking deeply about how to structure a bioethics curriculum so that students have optimal opportunities for learning and development whilst also being supported to make sense of the ethics of our world. As a bioethicist, it means advocating for the integration of perspectives from care ethics into how we think about and address ethical challenges. It also means working alongside healthcare providers to understand the importance of care in building ethical resilience.