Media Mentions

The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) state that drug testing laboratories under their jurisdiction must be independent void of conflict of interests, reports the Thoroughbred Daily News.

Former Horseracing Integrity and Safety Unit's (HIWU) general counsel Michelle Pujals worked as both a regulator and as a board director for the non-profit that purchased the lab responsible for testing, raising serious conflict of interest concerns.

Guadalupe Hayes-Mota, director of the bioethics program, explained that Pujals had a “fiduciary responsibility to the [SMRTL] nonprofit. So, she needs to act in the best interest of the nonprofit itself.”

As the general counsel for HIWU, however, “her responsibility is to uphold the standards” of the regulator, said Hayes-Mota.

“How could she actually have loyalties to both places?” said Hayes-Mota, describing it as a “strong conflict of interest.”

Guadalupe Hayes-Mota, director, bioethics, quoted by Thoroughbred Daily News.

More than 1 in 4 grandparents say their adult children have set rules about what they can share about their grandkids on social media.

A study by The Senior List, found that 75 percent of parents of children under 18 have explicit rules or general guidelines for what they share about their kids online. Irina Raicu, Markkula Center's director of internet ethics, believes parents have good reason to approach social media sharing with caution. “We are living in the age of facial recognition and deepfakes: AI tools available to anyone can now be used to identify people, including children, and one photograph is enough to create fake images and even videos that would seem real to most people,” she explained.

Irina Raicu, director, internet ethics, quoted by The Senior List.

When does political loyalty cease to be an expression of shared principles and become an abdication of independent judgment?

Davina Hurt, director, government ethics, reflects on the historic 2026 midterm election results, which resulted in major shifts in both the U.S. House and Senate, and result in a massive shift in political power. She raises questions about democracy, loss of public trust, and a responsibility to ethical leadership in governance.

Drawing an analogy with Hamlin's story of the Pied Piper, where "Pied Piper’s greatest power was not simply his ability to play a captivating tune. It was his ability to persuade others to follow without questioning where their journey would end."

Hurt reminds us that In a democracy, voters retain the right to question the destination a leader is asking them to follow, and says voters have a responsibility to reconsider promises and withdraw their support when they don't like the direction. She says, "Political loyalty is not a debt citizens owe their leaders. It is a trust that leaders must continually earn."

"Political cooperation is essential to governing. But cooperation becomes ethically troubling when loyalty to an individual displaces the obligation to question, deliberate and act independently," writes Hurt.

"An election can change the balance of power overnight. It cannot, by itself, restore public trust or guarantee ethical leadership. That requires leaders willing to place constitutional responsibility above political convenience, institutions prepared to exercise meaningful oversight, and citizens who refuse to surrender their judgment to the most compelling voice in the room."

Davina Hurt, director, government ethics, published by Salon.

Science has measurements that evaluate aging, but what are we actually measuring, and what criteria are being used to determine what is considered success?

Director of Bioethics, Guadalupe Hayes-Mota, distinguishes between recording a health condition and assigning meaning to it: “Writing down someone’s bone density or walking speed is documentation. Calling their aging ‘unsuccessful’ is a verdict.”

Describing an outcome as successful can imply achievement by the individual, even if the individual had no control over the conditions leading to the outcome. “Once you can measure aging and do something about it, decline starts to look like a choice,” observes Hayes-Mota.

“Once optimization becomes a duty, society can hand the problem of aging back to individuals,” Hayes-Mota said. “Then it never has to ask why some of them had so much less to work with.”

Guadalupe Hayes-Mota, director, bioethics, quoted by The Care Capitalist Substack.

Stocks tumbled across the board for two days in a row, particularly stocks associated with AI. AI and data centers are increasingly unpopular with voters, and tech stocks are seeing that backlash in the market.

Davina Hurt, director, government ethics, weighs in on why this is happening. Hurt says, "The American people said that this direction is not the one we would like to go in...I think they're just becoming increasingly uncomfortable about how much power is concentrated in the hands of people and institutions that they don't necessarily trust."

Davina Hurt, director, government ethics, interviewed by NBC Bay Area.

Ann Skeet, interim executive director, said Google’s apparent change of heart signals “that they are appreciating the importance of allowing educators to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to children’s education.”

The initial announcement smacked of hubris, Skeet said, with Google appearing to believe it may “understand better than life-long educators what’s best for students.”

Ann Skeet, interim executive director, quoted by The Mercury News (paywall) and republished by Government Technology, and SiliconValley.com.

Davina Hurt, director, government ethics, quoted by Agence France-Presse (AFP) and distributed across multiple markets, including Barron's, Japan Times, Yahoo News, and others.

Experts warn that the partnership between prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi and prominent news organizations to report on information from the betting markets and the election predictions and projections they spur, could result in confusion and misinformation.

"Elections are not games," Davina Hurt, director, government ethics told AFP. "My concern is that we've reached a point where financial market expectations carry more weight in the public's mind than the votes themselves."

A high probability "is not a promise," Hurt said. "When the prediction fails, that's not evidence that elections fail. But people are going to read that in."

Davina Hurt, director, government ethics, quoted by Agence France-Presse (AFP) and distributed across multiple markets, including Barron's, Japan Times, Yahoo News, and others.

Testimony describes plans for clandestine 2019 meeting between co-defendants in ex-mayor’s corruption trial, in which Thao has been accused of sharing information from the Council's closed session meetings, which would violate state laws about what types of information can be shared from such meetings.

Closed sessions are “supposed to be a private space where councilmembers can have frank discussions about what’s before them,” said Davina Hurt, director of government ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. “Anytime someone discloses what happens, it jeopardizes the case, it weakens the position of the city and it costs taxpayers.”

Davina Hurt, director of government ethics, quoted by The Mercury News.