Professor and director of Medical and Health Ethics at the Medical Faculty, University of Basel; member of the Board of Directors of the “Department of Public Health” (DPH). Stella Reiter-Theil has been instrumental in the development of bioethics / medical ethics and esp. clinical ethics in Europe. From 1986 to 1990, as a University Lecturer, she developed an ethics curriculum at the Medical Faculty of Vienna/Austria. From 1990 to 1995, she was in charge of setting up the Academy for Ethics in Medicine (AEM) at the University of Goettingen, Niedersachsen, Germany. Between 1995 and 2000, she was Director of the Department of Research at the newly founded “Center for Ethics and Law in Medicine“ (ZERM), University Hospital of Freiburg i. Br. In 1997 she co-organized the First World Conference on “Ethics Codes in Medicine and Biotechnology“ in Freiburg (with 1.000 participants). Stella Reiter-Theil was elected ANNE FRANK Professor and Director of the newly founded Institute for Applied Ethics and Medical Ethics (IAEME) at the University of Basel, Switzerland, in 2000. The work in Medical and Health Ethics is being carried out under the roof of the Medical Faculty and the University Hospital Basel with a broad network of interdisciplinary collaboration. Stella Reiter-Theil studied philosophy as well as psychology (“Doppelstudium“) at the University of Tuebingen, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany. After her graduation in both studies and a research-time with fellowships at the University Hospital for Psychotherapy in Vienna, Austria, she received her doctoral degree (PhD) in the disciplines of psychology and philosophy at the University of Tuebingen and a national award, the Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz-Preis. She undertook postgraduate training in family therapy in Vienna and psychotherapy in Freiburg and spent research times with fellowships for ethics projects at the Universities of Vienna / Austria, Oxford / GB, Georgetown / Washington DC, USA. In 1999, she received her “Habilitation“ / “Venia legendi“ and the academic degree "Privatdozentin" at the Medical Faculty of the University of Freiburg, Germany, for the discipline of Medical Ethics.
Research interests: Stella Reiter-Theil has been active with an interdisciplinary approach integrating empirical and theoretical approaches to the ethical study of medicine, health care and the life sciences. She is integrating researchers from medicine, philosophy, social and natural sciences in collaborative grant projects of ethical investigation. This has been elaborated particularly in the Research Program on Clinical Ethics. One of the central contributions of Stella Reiter-Theil and her colleagues to methodology in clinical ethics research is the development of the approach of the "embedded researcher" to investigate sensitive issues in a realistic way. This concept has raised interest and has been adopted by international research groups. She leads study groups of doctoral and PhD candidates of various disciplines, esp. medicine, psychology and the humanities.
Regarding stem cell research, she is interested to contributing to open discourse and unbiased analysis of basic as well as consequential ethical questions, also including issues of societal education in and acceptance of science.