Samia Hurst is a physician bioethicist, consultant to the Clinical Ethics Council of the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG), director of the Institute for Ethics, History, Humanities (IEH2) and the Department of Health and Community Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Geneva. Former president of the Swiss Society of Biomedical Ethics, she publishes the journal Bioethica Forum. She is also Vice-President of the Executive Committee of CIOMS, and a member of the Ethical Legal Social Issues advisory group of the Swiss Personalised Health Network, the Swiss National Advisory Commission on Biomedical Ethics and the Senate of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences.
Before joining the Institute of Biomedical Ethics of the Faculty of Medicine of Geneva, she was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda from 2001 to 2003. She was a founding member of the European Clinical Ethics Network, and co-organizes the Brocher Summer Academies in the Ethics of Global Population Health with Harvard University.
Very active in public discussions, she works with various media on issues related to bioethics. She maintains the “Bio-ethics” blog, one of the only ones to deal with these issues in French. Every two years, she co-organises the virtual conference “Resisting borders”, which brings together researchers and activists on issues related to the rights of refugees and migrants without participants having to cross borders.