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Persis Naumann

Dr. Persis Naumann is a global health ethicist, educator, and social entrepreneur committed to advancing stigma-free healthcare through ethics, education, and community engagement. Originally from Chennai, India, and now based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she serves as adjunct professor in the Center for Global Health Ethics at Duquesne University. Her interdisciplinary work bridges bioethics, medical sociology, and public engagement to address health inequities, particularly those affecting women and marginalized communities. Her research focuses on infertility stigma, reproductive health, and culturally responsive healthcare, with an emphasis on ensuring that lived experiences inform policy, education, and practice.

Beyond academia, Dr. Naumann is the founder of Kelir Global and Kelir Books, literary initiatives dedicated to ethical storytelling, heritage language preservation, and community belonging. She also serves on the board of directors of the Fulbright Association India Interest Group as vice president and the Greater Pittsburgh Chapter as advocacy chair. Through her scholarship and leadership, she builds bridges across cultures while promoting concepts such as equity, dignity, and inclusion.

As a former Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Fellow, Dr. Naumann conducted empirical bioethics research in Chennai, examining the sociocultural dimensions of involuntary childlessness and infertility stigma. During that tenure, she once had the opportunity to address an audience of over 2,000 students at a women’s health conference in Chennai. After her presentation, some of the students approached her with a simple question: “Will you come to our classrooms and teach us more?” That moment inspired her current Fulbright project.

As a 2026–2027 Fulbright U.S. Scholar, Dr. Naumann is collaborating with the Department of Sociology at the University of Madras on “Advancing Medical Sociology through Ethics Education for Stigma-Free Healthcare in Tamil Nadu.” The project is integrating medical ethics into sociology education through experiential learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, and community engagement. By partnering with students, faculty, healthcare professionals, NGOs, and policymakers, she seeks to strengthen the role of sociologists in healthcare, promote culturally grounded approaches to reproductive health, and foster lasting partnerships between India and the United States. Through the project, Dr. Naumann aims to help build more compassionate, equitable, and stigma-free healthcare systems guided by her belief that “education is not just about knowledge, it is about meaningful connections, creating pathways for real-life contributions, and shaping the future workforce with dignity and hope.”

Joris Gielen

Dr. Joris Gielen is the Eugene P. Beard Endowed Chair in Professional Ethics and the director of the Center for Global Health Ethics at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, where he also serves as associate professor. His work focuses on the ethical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of serious illness and end-of-life care, and his scholarly interests include global bioethics, end-of-life decision-making, and spirituality and cultural competence in healthcare. His academic training covers history, religious studies, theology, and Indian philosophy. He has an MA in Indian philosophy and religion from Banaras Hindu University and a PhD in theology from the University of Leuven, Belgium.

In his international and interdisciplinary career, Dr. Gielen has conducted extensive fieldwork in healthcare in India. His scholarship includes numerous peer-reviewed publications on palliative care, spirituality, ethics, and cultural competence in Indian healthcare, with his articles appearing in the Indian Journal of Palliative Care, Journal of Religion and Health, Palliative & Supportive Care, and Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy. He is also the editor of Dealing with Bioethical Issues in a Globalized World: Normativity in Bioethics (Springer, 2020). He has taught widely in the United States, Belgium, and India, offering graduate and undergraduate courses on different aspects of healthcare ethics, empirical methods, and culturally competent care.

Dr. Gielen’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining how patients, families, and clinicians in India navigate end-of-life decision-making. It is exploring the ethical tensions between autonomy, traditional values, and legal regulations within India’s healthcare system. By using participant observation and semi-structured interviews in New Delhi, the study is developing a grounded theory to explain the dynamics when decisions regarding the end of life are made. The project aims to foster understanding of end-of-life decision-making and contribute to the bioethics discourse through culturally responsive research and teaching.

Persis Naumann

Ms. Persis Naumann is a PhD Candidate and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Global Health Ethics, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, where she also holds a master’s degree in Healthcare Ethics. Her educational background includes a bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Sathyabama University, Chennai, India. Prior to moving to the U.S., Ms. Naumann taught IGCSE biology at Ghiyasuddin International School in the Maldives.

She is also the founder of Kelir Books LLC in Pittsburgh that produces bilingual Tamil language and cultural resources that represent all types of Tamil families including Tamils living around the globe, multicultural families, and language learners.

As a PhD student her research directly impacts Tamil women and the wider South Asian community. As a professor of ethics, she focuses on the promotion of cultural understanding and ethical decision making in cross-cultural care. In her entrepreneurial endeavor rooted in social responsibility, she equips and empowers parents and families through the complexities of socio-cultural identity in today’s world and advocates for ethical approaches in storytelling, representation, and business practice.

Ms. Naumann has extensive experience in bioethics empirical research including the qualitative research project, “Barriers to involvement in healthcare decision making in advanced cancer care in minority populations”, which was published in the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics Journal. She has also presented bioethics papers at major regional, national, and international ethics conferences and won several regional and national scholarships.

She worked with the Director of the American Nurse Association (ANA) Center for Ethics and Human Rights on nursing ethics policies, contributing towards ANA’s position statements and publications on gender and culture.

She has been a member of the Advisory Committee at Jeevaratchanai Social Service Organization Chennai, India, for over 10 years and currently provides them with quality and ethics consultation. By volunteering in person at the Jeevaratchanai children’s home and collaborating with the host institution during the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship she will spend time with the girls living there and students at the university, sharing America’s diverse culture and history through music, dance, sports, and food, celebrating the differences, and embracing the similarities in the cultures of America and India, as well as sharing her own travel and migration experience as a Chennai-born girl living in Pittsburgh. As a Global Health Ethicist with interdisciplinary experience, specialized in healthcare ethics research, teaching, practice, and policy, Ms. Naumann continues to contribute to the field of healthcare ethics, particularly at the intersections of class, culture, and gender.

Social stigma associated with involuntary childlessness persists in society – costing people their mental health, their relationships, their careers, and even their lives. Since much of the healthcare and ethics research, discourse, and processes stem from the Global North, they can lack the nuances and complexities that come with specific cultural understanding. This research aims to develop a robust, comprehensive, and culturally relevant ethical framework for sexual and reproductive healthcare by studying the impact of social stigma on healthcare decision making among women with involuntary childlessness in Tamil Nadu.

Through ongoing extensive research, Ms. Naumann is creating frameworks in the intersectional field of ethics, culture, and stigma in relation to healthcare access and decision making; lecturing in the field of healthcare education, raising the next generation of ethical thinkers and doers; and creating a network of culturally competent ethics trainers who will support organizations to address bias, stigma, and discrimination as a healthcare intervention.