Media contact: Alicia Rohan
UAB 2020 Ethics Bowl TeamThe University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Bioethics Bowl team competed in the Bioethics National Championship and came in second place.
The UAB team won the national championship in 2011, 2017 and 2019.
In 2020, over the course of three months, four undergraduate students on UAB’s Bioethics Bowl team mastered 15 cases for the Bioethics Bowl in Boston; but the pandemic forced the bowl that year to be canceled. However, the team persevered for the 2021 competition.
UAB’s team qualified for the national championship along with teams from Georgetown, Baylor, Gonzaga and Boston College. It was hosted by Oklahoma State University on April 10. The team competed virtually on Zoom and included philosophy/neuroscience majors Daniel Elston, Fuad Quashair and Elena Chesnokova and biochemistry major Anna Townsend, all in the Early Medical School Acceptance Program.
Director of the program and a bioethics professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Philosophy, Gregory Pence, Ph.D., coached the team.
The Bioethics Bowl is an intercollegiate, academic competition among undergraduate students at accredited four-year institutions of higher education. It occurs each April on a college campus. Unlike the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl, which debates cases across the curriculum from agricultural and engineering ethics to issues of grade inflations and communications, the Bioethics Bowl focuses exclusively on ethical issues in the health and biological sciences.