In late March of this year, we traveled to Lviv, Ukraine, to meet with students, alumni and collaborators at Ukrainian Catholic University. The collaboration between bioethics programs at our Jesuit Catholic institution, Loyola University Chicago, and U.C.U. began in 2016. Rooted in a shared mission for ethics education and for establishing a culture of responsible conduct in research, our partnership has now flourished for over a decade, despite unexpected obstacles. (More on that later.)
U.C.U. is the only Catholic university, and one of the very few private educational institutions, in Ukraine. Established by the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, it aims to “form leaders to serve with professional excellence in Ukraine and internationally for the glory of God, the common good and the dignity of the human person.” Though the Soviets closed what was founded as the Greek Catholic Theological Academy in 1944, its alumni formed the backbone of the underground Ukrainian Catholic Church during the subsequent decades of persecutions. In 1994, the academy revived its activities as Lviv Theological Academy, aiming to become a meeting point and to promote dialogue between the Ukrainian Church and society. In 2002, the Lviv Theological Society became U.C.U.
A Global Health Partnership
The partnership between Loyola and U.C.U. began somewhat quaintly. Father Ihor Boyko, then the director of U.C.U.’s School of Bioethics, mailed a letter to Loyola’s Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics. A few months later, Emily Anderson made her first visit to Lviv. Father Boyko, now the director of the Charitable Foundation Sheptytsky Hospital in Lviv (one of only two Catholic hospitals in Ukraine), describes the partnership as successful because it is “built upon shared values and enduring personal relationships,” as well as a “belief in the potential of Ukrainian professionals.”
After several subsequent visits to Lviv, Emily and Father Boyko received a five-year grant from the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health in March 2020. This provided the possibility for more substantive collaboration and engagement of physicians and scientists from across the country.
The Fogarty Center supports collaboration to develop global health scientific expertise in low and middle-income countries. Bioethics expertise is essential to promote the generation of high-quality scientific evidence. The war in Ukraine has created an urgent demand for such expertise, as research is critically needed to identify new solutions to health problems.
For example, new types of weapons lead to different types of injuries; for infectious and chronic diseases, the conditions of war may mean the usual ways of treating patients do not work as well. In the case of mental health, demand for services has increased exponentially. Additionally, international researchers increasingly want to conduct research in Ukraine.
Ethical considerations are always a critical part of research planning, implementation and dissemination, but war creates unique vulnerabilities for participants, such as long-term displacement. Not only is it important that research conducted in crisis settings adhere to the basic tenets of ethical research—that people or their data are not used without their permission, that potential benefits outweigh potential harms, and that participants are selected fairly—but it is also ethically imperative that the research conducted is responsive to the needs of the Ukrainian people.
Credit: Stefan Dmytryshyn
The Fogarty grant initially funded 10 Ukrainian physicians and scientists to enroll in Loyola’s doctorate in bioethics program, which can be completed online. Despite the eight-hour time difference, this model meets the needs of working health care professionals and has worked well for these students, who are committed to living and working in Ukraine.
Mark Kuczewski, director of the Neiswanger Institute, said: “We went online in 2002 in an effort to build a supportive learning community in which experienced health care professionals could contribute to each other’s knowledge and accompany one another in bringing their bioethics education to bear in their clinical work environment. With the onset of the Russian invasion, the accompaniment aspect of our program took on an urgency that one seldom encounters in graduate education.”
Father Boyko describes this accompaniment as “a bond rooted in daily solidarity.” The Ukrainian students learn alongside U.S. health care professionals; and while they are pursuing a specific concentration in research ethics, their coursework also includes clinical bioethics and broader bioethics questions rooted in Neiswanger’s commitment to social justice. Students have found this focus particularly useful as they face new challenges due to the Russian invasion, such as an increasing number of soldiers returning to the community with significant physical and mental health needs, and the resulting resource constraints.
Catalyst and Connecter
While coursework is done through Loyola, U.C.U. serves as both catalyst and connector to advance bioethics in Ukraine. Selected students are already positioned as leaders within their own institutions. Vladyslava Kachkovska, M.D., is an associate professor of internal and family medicine at Sumy State University Medical Institute, located near the front lines not far from the border with Russia. As one of the first Ukrainian students to enroll and graduate with a doctorate in bioethics, Dr. Kachkovska was drawn to the program because “Ukraine faces significant gaps in the field of bioethics with the lack of programs and experts. The Loyola program emerged as an invaluable opportunity for deepening our knowledge and skills in this essential area.”
Faith draws many physicians, nurses and other health care providers to bioethics. Liubov Hasiuk, M.D., a recent graduate and now medical director at Sheptytsky Hospital, says: “Studying bioethics strongly resonates with my Christian beliefs and allows me to take even better care of our patients. Faith is essential for medical staff. In the light of faith, our activities acquire deep meaning. In a Catholic clinic, the management team faces many challenges, and by perceiving work as a form of Christian service can one maintain inner strength.”
At the start of the invasion in February 2022, seven Ukrainian students were enrolled in the program, working toward their degrees. During the first days and weeks, we kept checking in to make sure they were safe. Everyone at Loyola was asking about them, but we weren’t really thinking about their coursework, assignments or grades. Our expectation was that most of the students would need to pause their education to focus on the needs of their patients, families and friends.
But after less than a week, the bioethics faculty members started seeing the Ukrainian students participating again on discussion boards. They were even turning in assignments and showing up for Zoom meetings. Our first instinct was to tell them not to worry about classes. But then we decided we would just follow their lead.
“With the outbreak of the war, the bioethics training platform became a space for sharing, mutual support, an opportunity to look at this crisis from a broader perspective, to be heard and to find solutions to existing problems together,” said Dr. Hasiuk. “The war highlighted and intensified ethical challenges that had already existed in the field of health care. I truly appreciate that complex issues were not silenced during the training, but on the contrary, were openly discussed and addressed through collective problem-solving.” In the very early days of the full-scale invasion, Dr. Hasiuk led efforts to establish hospice care at home for those previously being cared for in her hospital, in order to free up beds that might be needed to treat patients with acute war-related injuries.
Yaryna Pikulytska, M.D., a U.C.U. School of Bioethics project manager, transitioned from providing support for the program to being a student and started her first semester of bioethics classes in January 2022, days after the birth of her second child and just weeks before Russia’s invasion. Having completed her bioethics doctorate, Dr. Pikulytska now has a leadership role at U.C.U. as founder and chair of the ethics committee that reviews behavioral and social sciences research. Such achievements are a testament to the fact that life goes on during wartime.
Even when formal studies were disrupted, students stayed engaged. Elizabeth Dotsenko, M.D., who had previously worked with internally displaced people in Iraq and was living in Kyiv in February 2022, said: “I took a break [from classes], because I was displaced myself. I also started a humanitarian N.G.O. The course I took in the bioethics program on Ignatian spirituality helped me to go through very tough moments in the beginning of the full-scale invasion. One of our humanitarian convoys was shelled by Russians near Chernihiv; many were injured, and one person died.”
Fielding questions from the students and learning more about their challenges has inspired new scholarship and even a new course on bioethical issues in war available to all Loyola bioethics students that explores concepts such as just war theory, the roles and responsibilities of humanitarian organizations, and strategic military attacks on health care workers and facilities. Collaborative publications between Loyola faculty and Ukrainian students highlight the disruption of clinical trials for thousands of Ukrainian patients and the responsibilities of global pharmaceutical companies to ensure patient safety in the event of trial closure. Ukrainian students have also been supported to share their stories with the global medical and bioethics communities.
As the war continues, we also continue to identify new candidates. Olesya Vynnyk, M.D., started her bioethics education in January 2023. She remembers “sitting at a desk in the headquarters of the Lviv Medical Volunteer Battalion, putting together my application as both a sign of hope and a quiet expression of despair…. As the time passed and events continued to unfold, the course discussion board became one of the few stable elements in the midst of constant changes.” At the outbreak of the war, Dr. Vynnyk began working with medics caring for soldiers wounded on the frontlines, and she has traveled around the world and given presentations virtually on new challenges facing Ukrainian medicine.
Under Fire
After accompanying our Ukrainian bioethics students virtually through many personal and academic successes as well as challenges such as family members joining the military, local drone strikes and long periods without electricity, Loyola faculty members decided it was time to show up for our students in Ukraine.
The primary purpose of our recent visit to Lviv was a three-day conference to connect with researchers working in infectious disease and mental health, and also with veterans and soldiers; to learn about the ethical and responsible conduct of research; and to share the successes and scholarship of the students in the bioethics program with the broader U.C.U. community. We were joined by faculty members from Brown University and SUNY Downstate Medical Center who direct Fogarty-funded training programs in epidemiology research, as well as their Ukrainian students and collaborators.
The meeting, however, got off to an unexpected start.
Although it had been calm in Lviv for several months, on the afternoon of March 24, the day before intensive programming began, air raid alerts sounded. Russian drones struck apartment buildings near a 16th-century Bernardine monastery, and the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Lviv city center suffered damage. Luckily our group of Americans was at Sheptytsky Hospital with Father Boyko and Dr. Hasiuk. By that time, we had all downloaded the alert app on our phones, and we had sheltered the night before in our dormitory on campus. We understood that we were supposed to immediately seek shelter in the basement, and we were lucky to be in the hospital when this happened. At the time, we felt very safe. We didn’t learn the extent of the damage from the drone strike until we saw the video and later walked by the site. Luckily, the rest of the week was calm, allowing bioethics and epidemiology students from the different programs to meet, learn, plan and even share some meals.
After years of coursework, March’s meeting was special not only because everyone was together in Lviv but because so many Ukrainian bioethicists were now at the front of the room—teaching or sharing how they have applied their knowledge.
We were also celebrating. In July 2025, we received notice of another five years of funding for 10 more Ukrainian physicians and scientists in Loyola’s online bioethics doctoral program. Two new bioethics students traveled from Kyiv to meet us and the other students in person for the first time. Who knows what the future will bring, but we are already planning to meet in Lviv again in 2027.
This article appears in June 2026.
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