Syd Johnson, PhD '09

I was a nontraditional student and started grad school about 8 years after I graduated from college. I was already working in a career as a journalist and photo editor, so I studied part time for several years. It took a long time to finish my dissertation! I earned an MA in 2002 and graduated with a PhD in 2009. My AOS is ethics, and in particular bioethics, and my dissertation was on reproductive genetic technologies. 

I then had a post doctoral fellowship in Neuroethics at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada from 2009-2011. I remember Josiah Gould's seminars on Plato and Aristotle very fondly, even though I was not especially keen on either philosopher. He was such a lovely man, and we talked about movies a lot (I was a newspaper film critic while in grad school).  I'm at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY. I teach bioethics courses in the Medical school and the College of Health Professions, and I teach residents in medicine and neurology. I'm a clinical ethics consultant at Upstate's 3 hospitals, and the chair of the University Hospital Ethics Committee. Beyond Upstate, I'm on several national committees, including the NIH BRAIN Initiative Neuroethics Working Group, and I serve on the Data Safety Monitoring Board for a massive PTSD trial sponsored by the US Army. I'm the author or co-author of 4 books, and the editor of two books, and my scholarship now focuses on brain death, disorders of consciousness, xenotransplantation, and the ethics of animal research.  To be honest, I chose UAlbany because it was commuting distance from my home and job, and I chose philosophy because I just really liked my philosophy courses as an undergrad. At the time, I didn't yet know that bioethics would be my thing, so it was a stroke of luck that I ended up in a department with philosopher/bioethicist Bonnie Steinbock.

Thanks to the department's comprehensive exams, I had to learn a lot of history of philosophy, which served me well during my years as an adjunct and assistant philosophy professor. My undergrad degree was in Film — I pretty successfully combined the two disciplines in several philosophy and film courses I created.   At UAlbany, I took every bioethics or bioethics-adjacent course I could, along with philosophy of mind. I had the bad luck of graduating during the first job season after the 2008 economic crash, when job openings in philosophy cratered. My specialization in bioethics, however, prepared me well for a research fellowship in Neuroethics, during which I became notorious in Canada for arguing against bodychecking in youth hockey and fighting in professional hockey. The fellowship, and the opportunity to devote my time to writing and publishing, opened many doors for me. In my first TT position at Michigan Tech, I created a multidisciplinary Bioethics Minor Program. I'm really happy to be back in New York, and back at SUNY, and feel very lucky to have a flourishing career in bioethics.

Profile Information from February 2025.