On being a Brocher Fellow

Nina Hallowell, one of Reuben College’s Official Fellows, spent most of March as a Brocher Fellow in Switzerland. She’s written about her experiences – try not to be too envious…


March was the cruellest month - not!

The Brocher House in Geneva

The Brocher House on the shores of Lac Leman, Geneva

From the 1st -29th of March I was a Brocher Fellow staying at the Fondation Brocher on the shores of Lac Leman in Geneva. This was a very hard month; involving a lot of sitting around thinking, writing and engaging with the other Brocher fellows over fondue and/or wine.

During my time at Brocher, I was working on two papers from a Wellcome funded project which looked at ethical issues in the use of AI (facial recognition algorithms) for the diagnosis of rare diseases. Despite the fact that the sun shone (a lot for March) and the cold water swimming beckoned, I managed to put together two relatively shiny drafts for papers in PLOS One and BMC Medical ethics – so mission accomplished on the academic front.

Sunset over the gardens of Brocher House

View of sunset from the gardens

What was much better, though, was the wonderful time I had with a group of philosophers, bioethicists, lawyers, historians, ethicists, sociologists, social anthropologists, and health economists: all working on ELSI issues in biomedicine. Some were professors, some postdocs, and others were graduate students completing their PhD.  They were super interesting company, and every dinner was a little like one of Reuben’s Dining with Dinosaurs evenings on steroids. We debated the ethical issues of the day, when to go on wine-tasting events, the title of the health economist’s book and talked about what we had achieved that day – for me this was usually a 15 minute swim at 7 degrees C and a new paragraph written/few papers read. 

An arrow pointing to where Nina is swimming in Lac Leman

The arrow points to where Nina was cold water swimming

As you can see from the photos and their website, Fondation Brocher is the most beautiful, serene place.  It welcomes applications for residential fellowships from researchers at any stage in their career who are working on ethical, legal, and social aspects of biotechnology in medicine. It is a wonderful place to write up your PhD, and graduate students normally stay between 1-3 months.  Applications open usually in Jan/Feb for the following year.  I encourage you to go to the website and look at the pictures – you will want to go and write up there (and the swimming is magic!)