Munich Embedded Ethics and Social Science Hub - MESH
The Munich Embedded Ethics and Social Science Hub (MESH) is a cross-institutional research group of our Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine and the Department of Science, Technology, and Society. We work together to promote the integration of ethical and social aspects into the entire development process of health technologies in an integrated, collaborative, and interdisciplinary way.
The MESH brings together projects that address the critical ethical, social and political issues that arise with the application of new technologies. It emphasizes work that aims to improve care and equity and reach underserved populations in healthcare.
The approach we are developing is called Embedded Ethics and Social Science (EESS). It combines participatory research practices with empirical bioethical and social science analysis. The overarching goal is to support the ethical and socially responsible development of health technologies; technologies that benefit rather than harm individuals and society. To achieve this goal, projects that apply the Embedded Ethics and Social Science approach with us involve ethicists and/or social scientists in the development process from the very beginning. In this way, ethical and social issues that arise during the health technology development process can be anticipated, identified and mitigated early on, through all phases of technology development, from planning, ethical approval, design, programming, testing, review and implementation of the technology. Embedding ethics and social science in all phases of health technology development promotes innovative science that helps to anticipate, not just react to, ethical and social problems in the application of health technologies.
The MESH brings together a group of projects that focus primarily on the application of EE in artificial intelligence and machine learning as a particular focus of the Institute for History and Ethics in Medicine. However, we believe that the approach has the potential to be applied to many other areas of biomedicine and biotechnology.
MESH Steering Board:
Prof. Dr. Alena Buyx
PD Dr. Stuart McLennan
Dr. Amelia Fiske
Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller
MESH Lab Manager:
Theresa Willem; if you have any questions regarding MESH, feel free to reach out to: theresa.willem@tum.de
EN 
DE