Associate Professor Rosalind McDougall is a bioethicist specializing in health ethics at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, within the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences. She completed an undergraduate double degree with majors in genetics and philosophy (B.A.(Hons)/B.Sc.) at the University of Melbourne, followed by a B.Phil. in moral philosophy and ethics at the University of Oxford, and a PhD in bioethics from the University of Melbourne in 2010. Her doctoral research combined qualitative interviews with junior doctors and ethical analysis to examine moral distress in early clinical practice. Since joining the University of Melbourne post-PhD, she has progressed through roles including Research Fellow in Ethics, Senior Lecturer in Health Ethics, and currently Associate Professor. She also holds an Honorary Research Fellow position at the Children’s Bioethics Centre, Royal Children’s Hospital, and serves as a consultant clinical ethicist at Austin Health. McDougall teaches ethics in the Master of Public Health program, emphasizing compassionate discourse in discussions of sensitive topics.

McDougall’s research employs philosophical bioethics and qualitative methods to address practical ethical challenges in healthcare, including clinical ethics consultations, parental discretion in paediatric care, fertility preservation for prepubertal children, hospital visitor restrictions during infectious disease outbreaks, ethical issues in transgender youth healthcare, and implementation of voluntary assisted dying. She developed the world’s first ethical framework for decision-making about a child’s future fertility in collaboration with the Royal Children’s Hospital bioethics team. Key publications include the book 'When Doctors and Parents Disagree: Ethics, Paediatrics and the Zone of Parental Discretion' (2016, co-authored with Lynn Gillam), 'Ethics of fertility preservation for prepubertal children: Should clinicians offer procedures where efficacy is largely unproven?' (2017), 'When doctors and parents disagree: Ethics, paediatrics and the zone of parental discretion' (2017), and 'The zone of parental discretion and the complexity of paediatrics: A response to Alderson' (2018). She received an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellowship for her project on when health professionals should override parental decisions about children’s medical treatment. McDougall co-founded the Australasian Clinical Ethics Network and is a member of the Melbourne Clinical Ethics Group, contributing to clinical ethics support in hospitals since 2008. Her work has over 800 citations across 35 publications.

Professional Email: rmcdo@unimelb.edu.au