phD Position/Junior Research Fellow at the Department of Social Ethics

The department of Social Ethics at the Faculty of Protestant Theology is recruiting for two

phD position/Junior research fellow (m/f/d) (75%)                          

The position is limited to three years and can then be extended for a further year within the duration of the ERC project.

The Department of Social Ethics is dedicated to teaching and research in the area of ethical, societal and governance issues in the field of emerging technologies.

For the new ERC project SIMTWIN we are looking for a person who would like to work with us in Bonn. SIMTWIN aims to systematically identifying and examining the ethical and societal implications of the use of Digital Twins in healthcare. Although many aspects of health simulations such as DT are still in their infancy, it is already evident that these new technologies have the potential to challenge and change existing conceptions of health and illness, controllability, vulnerability, representation and embodiment. If, for example, every person had a “digital body” predicting health events in real-time before they occur, this would completely change the way a person conceptualises “their” health, providing new forms of entanglements and interactions between a person’s physical and the new digital body. Moreover, it would change the way we practice medicine and think about health policies. Transformations in these fundamental normative concepts will also have profound implications for extant national and European healthcare governance regimes. SIMTWIN’s central objective is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the normative challenges implied in order to develop an integrated theory of health simulations. In proposing an empirically-based and normatively robust framework for an ethical and societal assessment of this technology, SIMTWIN will enable the design of practical modes of controllability for the use of DT in health.