Faculty Spotlight: Associate Professor Mark Fedyk, PhD

Dr. Mark Fedyk is an Associate Professor at UC Davis Health, where he teaches primarily in the School of Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.  He is also affiliated with the Family Caregiving Institute and is a member of the Steering Committee for the Center for Neuroengineering & Medicine at UC Davis. He is in the Clinical Research Graduate Group and the Nursing Science and Health-Care Leadership (PhD) Graduate Group.

• Tell us about your background and current field of research.

My background is eclectic. Before going to graduate school, I worked in IT for several years, did research for federal governmental agencies focused on trade and housing markets, and also worked as a consultant for some university HR projects. In graduate school I cross-trained in ethics, philosophy of science, and cognitive science. My belief at the time was that many of the classical ethical theories that are still taught to this day are out-of-date, in the sense that they make presuppositions about how the human mind works and how things like personality and character develop that are incompatible with research in experimental psychology and cognitive science. Getting up to speed on the scientific research in this area would therefore lead to insights into how to update the relevant ethical theories.

My views have changed since. I think I over-rated the likelihood that mainstream views about the mind and emotions in cognitive science are anywhere close to being true. It is premature to try to build a useful ethics on the foundations of the contemporary psychological sciences. Consequently, most of my research now focuses on developing ethical frameworks and models that can be used and updated in ways that have the characteristics of scientific inquiry and learning. I think this approach is more likely to succeed, in the long run, in producing ethical concepts and models that aren't deeply incompatible with the best available scientific knowledge in psychology, but also the clinical sciences, and social sciences like anthropology and economics.

• How did you get to this research field? What led you to it?

I think ethics is one of the few remaining fields of research where it is still possible to make discoveries that are fundamental in nature. I am excited to be part of a discipline that, in some sense, is several centuries behind other, more mature fields of inquiry. I also deeply enjoy being able to work with -- and learn from -- collaborators that span a very wide range of disciplines: I'm doing research with nurse scientists, neurologists, emergency medicine physicians, developmental psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, experts in informatics and public health, and now engineers in neurotechnology. Each of these fields has a need for different class of ethical models -- there is no such thing as "ethics independent" or "ethics neutral" science -- and so there is the challenge of developing models that both can be used to generate ethical knowledge applicable in the relevant area of scientific research, and which are relatively coherently integrated as a productive element in the conceptual-theoretical structure of the scientific research.

I think that it can and should play a similar role in many social sciences as statistics: it can be a source of methodological insight that increases the value of the research that gets carried out.

• What’s your passion? What motivates you?

My fundamental drive is curiosity.  I like working at a large university like UC Davis because it is incredibly easy to keep learning. We have world-class experts in nearly every academic discipline, and I get a lot of motivation from being able to work alongside these people.

• What would you like to see the field achieve in the next 5-10 years?

First, I would like ethics to become more interdisciplinary. Above, I drew an analogy between statistics and ethics that I take very seriously. I think the history of the development of statistical knowledge in the 20th century contains some important lessons for how the ethics of science can develop. So, one of the key breakthroughs for me would be for people coming from disciplines other than philosophy to take ethics seriously enough to try to develop highly-integrated, highly-generative ethical frameworks that can be productive elements of some area of scientific practice.  

Second, I'd like to see the common understanding of ethics find some way of putting to rest the "it is all relative, so rigor does not matter" reaction that people have. Given the importance of developing justified, useful answers to many outstanding ethical problems embedded in scientific research, I'm amazed by how easy it is for many scientists to tolerate a yawning gap in standards of rigor and evidential quality between putatively non-ethical knowledge and ethical knowledge. It is hard to justify automatically accepting lower standards for ethics.

Finally, I'd be happy if more ethicists studied and appreciated the creative and diverse ways in which practitioners and scientists solve very technical ethical challenges as a matter of course in carrying out research or undertaking skilled practice. There is a lot of ethical discovery going on that doesn't call attention to itself.

• What advice do you have for students interested in neuroengineering? 

I think all students in neuroengineering should study the history of technology and medicine, with the goal of developing their own perspective on what technological progress has been, and what should technological progress look like in the future. To that end, I think all neuroengineering students should read "The Progress of Experiment: Science and Therapeutic Reform in the United States, 1900–1990" by Henry Marks.