About The Augustine Bioethics Network
We are an international network administered and overseen by a company limited by guarantee based in the United Kingdom. The network is supported by a committee, and by an advisory board which includes two theological advisors. Our patron is the great philosopher and theologian, Augustine of Hippo.
Our Ethos
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Our History
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Committee members
Prof. Neil Scolding
PhD FRCP
Prof. Neil Scolding is the Emeritus Burden Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Bristol and a consultant neurologist in Cheltenham. He currently spends 3-4 months each year teaching and training in northern Uganda, at St Mary’s Hospital Lacor, and at Gulu University. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
Neil Scolding is Chair of the Augustine Bioethics Network and a Guarantor of ABN Ethics Ltd.
He trained in Neurology in Cardiff, in Cambridge, and at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, and was a University Lecturer and Consultant Neurologist in Cambridge before coming to Bristol as the Foundation Burden Chairholder in 1999.
Prof. David Albert Jones
MA (Cantab), MA, MSt, DPhil (Oxon), FHEA
David Albert Jones is Secretary to the Augustine Bioethics Network and a Director of ABN Ethics Ltd. He is also a Professor of Bioethics at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, Clinical Professor at the Plunkett Centre for Ethics, Australian Catholic University, and Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University (courtesy of whom, profile picture right).
Professor Jones read Natural Sciences and Philosophy at Cambridge, and Theology at Oxford. His doctorate, which focused on the thought of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, was published as Approaching the End (Oxford University Press, 2007). Other publications include The Soul of the Embryo (Continuum, 2004) and Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: Lessons from Belgium (Cambridge University Press, 2017, co-edited with Chris Gastmans and Calum MacKellar) in addition to numerous book chapters and journal articles, most recently Slippery slopes down under: the progressive loosening of requirements for voluntary assisted dying in Australia and New Zealand New Bioethics November 2025.
Professor Jones is a member of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the EU (COMECE) Commission on Ethics and is a Corresponding Member of the Pontifical Academy for Life. In 2009 he was a member of a working party of the General Medical Council which helped draft its guidance on Treatment and Care Towards the End of Life. He served as Vice-Chair of the Ministry of Defence Research Ethics Committee from 2009-2024 and, while not formally a member, regularly attended the Moral and Ethical Advisory Group (MEAG) that provided independent advice to the UK government on moral, ethical and faith considerations during COVID (2019-2022). He has provided oral or written evidence to parliamentary, non-governmental, professional and regulatory bodies on over 100 occasions, both in the UK and internationally.
Gwen McCourt
BA (Lond), Dip.German (Open)
Gwen McCourt is Treasurer of the Augustine Bioethics Network and a Director of ABN Ethics Ltd. She is an experienced administrator and events organiser, with more than 15 years experience in general and financial administration.
Dr Mike Delany
Dr Mike Delany originally trained as a nurse at King’s College hospital in London. He later studied medicine at University College London and spent time working in anaesthetics and paediatrics before switching to general practice and spending twenty five years in that field. He holds an MA in Bioethics from St Mary’s, Twickenham and has a particular interest in helping healthcare professionals navigate the increasing number of ethical dilemmas encountered in everyday practice. He is a past president of the UK Catholic Medical Association.
Mike Delany is a Committee Member of the Augustine Bioethics Network and a Guarantor of ABN Ethics Ltd.
Advisory board
Prof Laura Palazzani
Professor Laura Palazzani is Professor of Philosophy of Law at LUMSAUniversity in Rome, where she also directs the Center for Bioethics and Digital Transition and the Center for ethics in scientific research. Her academic work spans bio-law, ethics of science and technology, human rights, and AI governance.
Prof. Palazzani served (2010-2025) as a member of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE), which advises the European Commission on the ethical implications of scientific and technological innovation. From 2016 to 2023, she was a member of the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee, where she contributed to global policy dialogue on biomedical ethics and the responsible development of AI. She has also been member and Vice President of the Italian National Bioethics Committee, the country’s advisory body on bioethical issues (2002-2022), and served on ethics committees of national institutions, including the Italian Ministry of Health and AIFA (Italian Medicines Agency). She has participated in numerous EU-funded research projects (Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe), working on the ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI, genomics, and digital transformation in health care. Her work with the Pontifical Academy for Life (as member since 2016 and in the Steering Committee since 2022) and in the Steering Committee of Human Rights in the field of Health and Biomedicine at the Council of Europe, reflects her deep commitment to ensuring that new technologies remains aligned with human dignity, justice, and human rights. Prof. Palazzani has published extensively on topics ranging from bioethics and bio-law (beginning and end of life issues) to AI and neuroscience and the law. She is also actively involved in teaching at both national and international levels.
Research fields: Bioethics, bio-law on beginning of life issues and end of life issues; cure and experimentations; AI and neurotechnologies between ethics and law; gender issues; C. Thomasius
Dr. Xavier Symons
Xavier Symons is Director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics at ACU. Xavier previously worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Human Flourishing Program in the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University and prior to this was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Plunkett Centre and a Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics and Society at the University of Notre Dame Australia. He has lectured in bioethics at the University of Technology Sydney Faculty of Law and at the University of Notre Dame Australia Medical School.
Xavier’s research interests span a broad range of themes in bioethics. He wrote a doctoral thesis on contemporary theories of distributive justice and the ethics of healthcare resource allocation. He has written extensively about the ethics of end of life care and voluntary assisted dying. More recently he has explored the ethics of conscientious objection in healthcare. His first book, Why Conscience Matters: A Defence of Conscientious Objection in Healthcare, was published in July 2022 by Routledge.
Xavier has contributed extensively to both Australian and international media outlets and his work has been featured in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Financial Review, ABC Religion and Ethics, The Guardian, and Public Discourse. He holds degrees from the University of Sydney, the University of Oxford, and the Australian Catholic University.
Prof. Daniel Sumasy
MD, PhD, MACP
Daniel Sulmasy, MD, PhD, MACP is a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and on the faculty of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics. He is the inaugural Andre Hellegers Professor of Biomedical Ethics, with co-appointments in the Departments of Philosophy and Medicine at Georgetown.
His research interests encompass both theoretical and empirical investigations of the ethics of end-of-life decision-making, ethics education, and spirituality in medicine. He has done extensive work on the role of intention in medical action, especially as it relates to the rule of double effect and the distinction between killing and allowing to die. He is also interested in the philosophy of medicine and the logic of diagnostic and therapeutic reasoning. His work in spirituality is focused primarily on the spiritual dimensions of the practice of medicine. His empirical studies have explored topics such as decision-making by surrogates on behalf of patients who are nearing death, and informed consent for biomedical research.
He continues to practice medicine part-time as a member of the University faculty practice. He completed his residency, chief residency, and post-doctoral fellowship in General Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He has previously held faculty positions at the University of Chicago and New York Medical College. He has served on numerous governmental advisory committees, and served on the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues fro 2010-2017.
He is the author or editor of seven books: The Healer’s Calling (1997), Methods in Medical Ethics (2001; 2nd ed. 2010, 3rd ed. 2026), The Rebirth of the Clinic (2006), A Balm for Gilead (2006), Safe Passage: A Global Spiritual Sourcebook for Care at the End of Life (2013), Francis the Leper: Faith, Medicine, Theology, and Science (2014), and Physician Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: Before, During, and After the Holocaust (2020). He also serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics.
Dr. Sulmasy holds a Ph.D from Georgetown University and an M.D from Cornell University. He holds emeritus status at the University of Chicago, where he was Kilbride-Clinton Professor of Medicine and Ethics in the Department of Medicine and Divinity School, Associate Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics in the Department of Medicine, and Director of the Program on Medicine and Religion.
Dr Mary Neal
Reader Strathclyde University
Dr Mary Neal is currently a Reader at Strathclyde University. She holds LLB (Honours) and LLM (by research) degrees from the University of Glasgow, and a PhD from Cardiff University (2005).
Dr Neal teaches and co-ordinates two Honours classes: Abortion Law Honours and Law, Persons and Property Honours. She supervises research students in Healthcare Law and Ethics, Family Law, Human Rights, and Legal Theory.
Dr Neal’s main research interests are in the broad areas of Healthcare Law and Legal Theory, and her current research focuses on conscientious objection in healthcare, abortion law, ‘assisted dying’, human rights (particularly Article 9 and Article 10 ECHR), human dignity, and theories of property.
Prof Chris Gastmas
Chris Gastmans is Full Professor of Medical Ethics and Director of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Law, Faculty of Medicine, KU Leuven, Belgium. He is the coordinator of various empirical and philosophical research projects regarding ethical issues in care for older adults and end-of-life care. He is the (co-)author of more than 200 articles published in peer-reviewed international journals. He co-edited the book ‘Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: Lessons from Belgium’ (Cambridge University Press).
He teaches medical ethics at the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Theology. He also teaches ethics in end-of-life care in the KU Leuven Master of Bioethics programme. He co-ordinates the annual Summer Course on Ethics in Dementia Care and the annual Intensive Course in Nursing Ethics (www.cbmer.be).
He is member of the ethics committee of the University Hospitals of Leuven, the National Bioethics Committee of Belgium, and the Pontifical Academy for Life, Vatican City.
Prof. David Paton
Prof. David Paton is Professor of Industrial Economics at the Nottingham University Business School. He completed his PhD at University College London in 1997 and has published widely in journals such as Economic Journal, Management Science, Journal of Health Economics, Public Choice, Social Science & Medicine, Southern Medical Journal and Issues in Law and Medicine. He has acted as an adviser to several Government departments including HM Revenue and Customs, DCMS and the DTI, and has particular expertise in the economics of teenage pregnancy, Covid policy, gambling taxation, the post-Brexit economy, and the economics of cricket.
Rev. Prof. Emmanuel Agius
Mgr. Prof. Emmanuel Agius is the former Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Malta. He studied philosophy and theology at undergraduate (S.Th.B.) and postgraduate (S.Th.L.) levels at the University of Malta and then at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, where he obtained an M.A. in philosophy and S.Th.D. He pursued post-doctoral research in the field of bioethics at the University of Tuebingen, Germany as a fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Stiftung; at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. as a Fulbright scholar; and at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, with the assistance of Theodore Hesburgh scholarship.
He is professor of Moral Theology and Philosophical Ethics at the University of Malta. He is the former Head of the Department of Moral Theology at Faculty of Theology, a member of the European Group of Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE), which is an advisory interdisciplinary group to the European Commission, and a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life. He is the moderator of the Commission on Ethics within the Commission of Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (COMECE). For many years, he was an active member of the National Consultative Bioethics Committee, the coordinator of the Euro-Mediterranean Programme on Intercultural Dialogue, Human Rights, and the Future Generations Programme, which was supported by UNESCO. H.G. the Archbishop, Mgr. Charles J. Scicluna, appointed Mgr. Agius member of the Metropolitan Cathedral Chapter on 25th January 2018 and member of The St John’s Co-Cathedral Foundation on 1st August 2019. On 13th December 2020, Prof Agius received Malta’s highest honour (Midalja ghall-Qadi tar-Repubblika) for his sterling service in the area of bioethics and professional ethics, both in his native country and on the international scene. Prof. Agius is the author and co-editor of a number of publications. Several of his articles on bioethical, social and environmental issues, marriage and sexuality have appeared in a number of international peer-reviewed academic journals.
Theological Advisor
Sr Margaret Atkins
Canoness of St. Augustine, Boarbank Hall
Sr Margaret is a Canoness of St Augustine in the community at Boarbank Hall in Cumbria. She was a Senior Lecturer in Theology at Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds. She has particular interests in virtue ethics, in the ethics of healthcare and of the environment, and in St Augustine.
To come