Staff Profile

Prof Bob Simpson, BA, PhD

Professor and Chair of BoS in the Department of Anthropology

Chair of the Board of Studies, Department of Anthropology

Professor & Head of Department in the Health and Human Sciences

Department Undergraduate Co-Ordinator, Health and Human Sciences

Member of Durham CELLS (Centre for Ethics, Law and the Life Sciences)

Fellow of Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing

(email at robert.simpson@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

Bob Simpson is a social anthropologist whose current research interests focus on Bioethics, Biomedicine and Biotechnologies in developing world contexts. One of the main research settings in which he has explored the encounter between challenging technological developments and local systems of values and beliefs is Sri Lanka. Between 2002-04 he held a Wellcome Biomedical Ethics Fellowship which enabled him to carry out research into the reception of new reproductive and genetic technologies.

He is currently work on the ethics of experimentation and the governance of scientific research in Asia through an ESRC/DfID funded project:

Biomedical Health Experimentation in South Asia [£500k Bob Simpson CI along with Dr Salla Sariola (Durham) and Professor Roger Jeffery and Dr Ian Harper (Edinburgh)].

Recently completed projects include:

Infertility and the New Reproductive Technologies among British Pakistani Moslems. [£167k Bob Simpson, Principal Investigator along with Kate Hampshire, Co-Investigator and Mwenza Blell Reseacher]
International Science Collaborations and Bioethics. [£1.4million Professor Marilyn Strathern as Principal Investigator and Bob Simpson Co-Investigator [Durham], Monica Konrad [Cambridge] and Margaret Sleeboom Faulkner [Sussex].

He was also Principal Investigator on a Researcher Development Initiative project [£58k along with Robin Humphrey of Newcastle University ] to develop workshops and resources supporting third year PhD students writing up Qualitative data: Writing Across Boundaries. This project also provides support for students from Sunderland, Teesside and Northumbria as well as Durham and Newcastle.