Rate My Professor Grant Gillett

Emeritus Professor Grant Gillett serves as Professor of Biomedical Ethics in the Department of Bioethics within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Otago. He holds an MBChB and MSc from the University of Auckland, a DPhil from the University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (FRACS), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ). As a qualified neurosurgeon, Gillett contributes to medical education through teaching in early learning in medicine, cognitive neuroscience, and graduate papers in bioethics. His career integrates clinical neurosurgery with philosophical inquiry into medical ethics and neuroscience.

Gillett's research spans bioethics, including end-of-life care, complementary and alternative medicine, patient autonomy, and the patient's journey; neuroethics, covering brain birth and death, persistent vegetative states, minimally conscious states, free will, identity, and responsibility; and philosophy of psychiatry, addressing mental disorders, psychopathy, and dissociative disorders through post-structuralist philosophy, the patient's voice, post-colonialism, and human subjectivity. He is a Fellow of The Hastings Center. His major publications include books such as Subjectivity and Being Somebody: Human Identity and Neuroethics (2008, Imprint Academic), Bioethics in the Clinic (Johns Hopkins University Press), The Mind and its Discontents (Oxford University Press), Reasonable Care (Bristol Press), Representation, Meaning and Thought (Oxford University Press), and co-authored The Discursive Mind (Sage). Recent works encompass Ethics in Neurosurgical Practice (2020) and contributions to the biopsychosocial model of health and disease (2019). Gillett has published articles in leading journals including Philosophy, British Medical Journal, Lancet, Philosophical Psychology, Inquiry, Mind, Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Consciousness and Cognition, Brain, Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, and Bioethics. His work, cited over 9,000 times, influences embodied cognition, philosophy of mind, bioethics, and post-structuralism.