Daniela Cutas

My background is in Philosophy (BA), Government and Institutional Development (MA), Health Care Ethics and Law (MA), Research Ethics (Advanced Certificate), and Political Science (PhD). I am docent in Philosophy since 2013 and meriterad lärare since 2019. 

In my PhD thesis, which I defended in 2006, I analysed the concepts ‘dignity’ and ‘rights’ and the ways in which they have been used in the context of the prospects of human cloning and genetic engineering. I focused on the use of these concepts in two legislative documents, the Council of Europe’s Bioethics Convention and its Cloning Protocol. I traced the concepts to their purported philosophical roots and I highlighted tensions between the values that the drafters of the two documents endorsed and the provisions that they espoused. During my PhD studies, I obtained a Marie Curie fellowship at the University of Manchester.  

Subsequent to obtaining my PhD, between 2006 - 2007, I worked on the EURECA project on delimiting the research concept, funded by the European Commission at the University of Manchester. Between 2007 and 2009, I was postdoctoral fellow at the University of Gothenburg, working on a project on the normative distinctions netween natural and assisted human reproduction. Between 2010 and 2012, I worked at Karolinska Institutet where I taught research ethics to PhD students. Between 2012 and 2013, I worked at Maastricht University, on a project on the ethics of research towards developing human gametes in vitro. Since 2012, I work at Umeå University, while also retaining an affilliation with the University of Gothenburg.