Katherine Wade, BCL, LLM

Katherine Wade, BCL, LLM

 Role: Doctoral Candidate and DCYA Research Scholar, University College Cork
Cork, Ireland

  Contact: 110221760@umail.ucc.ie

  Research Interests:
Medical Law | Research Ethics | Human Rights | Children's Rights

Katherine Wade is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law, University College Cork, Ireland. She is currently a DCYA research scholar, and a visiting scholar at Emory Law School with the Child Rights Project and the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative. She will be at Emory Law School until Friday, September 13. Her research focuses on the legal regulation of medical research with neonates in Ireland. It examines the ethical issues which arise in involving neonates in medical research and examines the legal approach to these issues from a children’s rights perspective. The thesis will also make recommendations for reform which are shaped by principles of children’s rights law, theory and policy.

Katherine is in the US to do some comparative research in order to identify best practice in this area. The areas which are of particular interest to her are the law regarding non-therapeutic research, parental informed consent, and the functioning of IRBs who approve pediatric research. Some of this comparative research was carried out in St Louis University Law School, Center for Health Law Studies in August 2013. During her time at Emory University, she aims to enhance her understanding of children’s rights theory and vulnerability analysis to inform my recommendations for reform. In particular, she wishes to develop the theoretical framework of her thesis by exploring the meaning of taking a children’s rights approach in this area and the challenges inherent in this approach. For example, core challenges involve the application of the best interests principle in the context of research which offers no benefit to an individual child and the development of a framework for parental decision-making which is child-centered and compliant with a neonate’s human rights.

*Link to Interview (YouTube)

https://youtu.be/XIkfokahWww

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