Bobbie Farsides joined the Brighton and Sussex Medical School as Professor of Clinical and Biomedical Ethics in 2006. She had previously held posts at the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics, King’s College London (Lecturer/Senior Lecturer 1996-2006) and the Department of Philosophy, Keele University (Lecturer 1986-96). She is a graduate of the London School of Economics (B.Sc Econ Government) where she also studied for her PhD under the late Professor Sir Maurice Cranston.

Professor Farsides has been involved in developing the academic field of Bioethics for over thirty years. Whilst at Keele she was part of the team that established innovative Masters programmes which continue to this day, and whilst at King’s she was part of the team delivering their highly successful MA in Medical Law and Ethics.

The General Medical Council l has required for decades that ethics is a ‘continual strand’ throughout the undergraduate curriculum‘. Professor Farsides and her colleagues teach all five year groups on the BSMS BMBS course through a mixed portfolio of lectures, student selected components, supervision of dissertations and team teaching with clinical colleagues in hospital and community settings. BSMS is proud to be a medical school which takes ethics education seriously in terms of curriculum space and assessment.

Professor Farsides’s research work combines her early education and interest in social science with her philosophical training, and she is seen as something of a pioneer in the field of empirical Bioethics. She is committed to undertaking genuinely interdisciplinary research, and to building and sustaining the networks necessary to allow that. For the past twenty years a major focus of her work has been on the experience of health care professionals and medical scientists operating in ethically contested areas. Through a succession of funded projects she was able to develop methodological and conceptual tools which allow for an in-depth study of how individuals and teams negotiate and carry the complex ethical issues embedded in their work. Her studies covered fields such as stem cell research, assisted reproduction, embryo research, organ donation and most recently genomics. Her main research commitment currently is as co-PI for a Wellcome Trust Collaborative award held by BSMS and Oxford University. With Professor Anneke Lucassen she is leading a large multidisciplinary team looking at the issue of ethical preparedness in relation to genomic medicine,

Whilst in Keele Professor Farsides established the country’s first specialist course in palliative care ethics, and this experience combined with her long standing relationship with the Cicely Saunders Institute at KCL, means another strand of her work has been the ethical issues raised by life limiting conditions, particularly neuro-degnerative and/or rare diseases, and the ethics of end of life care. She is currently involved in two projects in this area, one looking at developing patient led outcome measures in paediatric palliative care settings(led by Prof Richard Harding CSI KCL), and the other looking at the use of advance decision making in caring for people with advanced MS (led by Prof Jonathan Koffman previously CSI KCL now Hull York Medical School).

As ethicists have become recognised for the contribution they can make to the development, critique and governance of public policy Professor Farsides has held a number of important roles. She has twice served as a Specialist Adviser to House of Lords committees first relating to Lord Joffe's Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill and then on the European Commission's Organ Donation Directive. She has been a member of the UK Organ Donation Taskforce, the UK Donation Ethics Committee, the vCJD Incidents Panel, and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. She chaired a working party for the Nuffield Council on Bioethics looking at the ethical issues raised by clinical research involving children, and at the same time served on a NICE guidance writing group on Children’s End of Life care, She was a long standing member of the British Medical Association (BMA) Medical Ethics Committee, and a member of the Medical Ethics Advisory group for both Genomics England and the Accelerating Diagnosis of Disease initiative. She also chaired the Research Ethics committee of bpas. She served a full term as a Trustee of the Medical Research Foundation which was established as the charitable funding arm of the Medical Research Council and remains Chair of one of their funding committees. She was joint chair of the Medical Ethics expert group to the Infected Blood Inquiry.

Since joining BSMS Professor Farsides has been able to expand her activities in relation to global health issues and she is an active member of the Global Health Bioethics Network. She has supervised doctoral projects in The Gambia, Ethiopia and now in China, and has strong links to the ethics and public engagement teams in all the Wellcome Trust Major Overseas project sites.

As a long standing member of faculty Professor Farsides sees an important part of her role as offering mentorship and support to junior colleagues, and she is an enthusiastic and committed mentor to a number of colleagues within BSMS, partner universities and beyond. She was Deputy Chair of the BSMS Research Ethics and Governance committee for ten years and also served as Deputy Director, and then Director of Student Support,