Zoe Lewczak | Class of 2026

Zoe Lewczak has been asking questions about health, behavior, and ethics since long before she arrived at Harvard Medical School. As a teenager in Virginia, she worked campaigns that introduced her to public health advocacy, policy change, and the possibility that sustained community work could shape legislation. That early experience helped set the foundation for a career rooted in one central question: how can health systems better support human flourishing?

Before joining the Master of Science in Bioethics program at Harvard Medical School, Lewczak worked across public health, higher education, and clinical research. She supported a statewide childhood obesity prevention and anti-tobacco campaign funded through the Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth, then worked at Georgetown University with graduate programs in global health and infectious disease. Later, while studying bioethics part-time at Harvard, she worked full-time on NIH RECOVER, a national research initiative focused on understanding Long COVID.

Lewczak credits her time at Georgetown with helping her understand graduate education from the inside. Reading applications and working with graduate students gave her insight into what strong applicants bring to advanced study. It also helped her overcome some of the intimidation she felt about applying to Harvard. “Sometimes, the name of Harvard can be a little bit scary,” she says. “I was actually really scared to apply.” Still, she submitted the application. “I’m so glad that I did.”

Bioethics was not a late discovery for Lewczak. At the University of Virginia, she studied cognitive science with a concentration in neuroscience and also minored in bioethics. The field appealed to her because it offered room for intellectual curiosity across medicine, law, philosophy, theology, and public policy. “I have been a curious girl for as long as I can remember,” she says. “Bioethics allows you to explore those curiosities in different fields, different realms, and question the things that you might not have even thought were questionable.”

When choosing among bioethics programs, Lewczak was especially drawn to Harvard Medical School. As someone with clinical interests and plans to apply to an MD program, she wanted a curriculum that would keep her close to patient care. Through Harvard Medical School, she was able to take a medical school elective, spend time in the hospital, and learn alongside medical students and students from other master’s programs. “I really loved that our program was based out of the medical school,” she says. “That clinical experience was pretty incredible, and not something a lot of people can say they’ve done, especially as a pre-med student.”

The program’s interdisciplinary community quickly broadened how she understood the field. One of the most influential perspectives came from law. In class, Lewczak encountered cases that reshaped how she thought about informed consent, decision-making capacity, and patient autonomy, including Shine v. Vega, a Massachusetts case involving a physician’s authority in relation to a patient’s ability to make their own health care decisions. “This program and my classmates, as well as my professors, really broadened my horizon,” she says. “Shine v. Vega now lives rent-free in my head.”

Her capstone project brought those interests into the clinical ethics space. Lewczak worked with Michael Ieong, MD, who served as both her faculty mentor and capstone mentor. Their relationship became one of the defining parts of her Harvard experience.

“He is one of the most incredible humans I’ve ever met,” Lewczak says. “He truly embodies what I hope to be as a future physician-ethicist.” Their meetings often ran long, moving from clinical cases to ethics committee work to broader questions about what it means to practice medicine with moral clarity and humility. “Every conversation I have with him allows me to think outside of the box,” she says.

Through that mentorship, Lewczak shaped a capstone project focused on clinical ethics consultation services. She had long been interested in a deceptively simple question: why do so many clinicians and patients not know that clinical ethics teams exist, or that they can be consulted in moments of uncertainty? That question led her to design an intervention aimed at better integrating clinical ethics consult services into clinicians’ everyday work.

The project is now moving beyond the classroom. Lewczak and Ieong are preparing to launch a study at Boston Medical Center to test whether increased exposure to clinical ethics services can raise consultation rates and improve moral resilience among clinicians. Moral resilience, she explains, involves how clinicians understand their values and decision-making within the hospital setting, particularly when faced with difficult or ethically complex situations.

“If people feel that their values are seen, heard, and understood, that creates a resilience factor,” she says. Clinical ethics, in her view, can help clinicians feel less isolated in moments where there may be no easy answer. “I don’t understand why, in medicine, it’s expected for people to see some of the most egregious things anyone could ever experience, where there is no real answer, and then make their own moral judgment alone.”

Lewczak hopes that the project can eventually be scaled beyond Boston Medical Center. She has already presented the work at the Center for Bioethics capstone symposium and at NYU Langone’s Department of Population Health Research Day. If the intervention increases consult utilization and supports clinician moral resilience, she believes that it could help demonstrate the value of clinical ethics services across hospital systems. Her larger goal is to “socialize bioethics.”

“I want bioethics to be a household name,” Lewczak says. “I want people to know that they can lean on clinical ethics teams.” Too often, she adds, ethics is misunderstood as a policing force or a distant committee. “The reality is, we’re here to help. We’re here to support.”

While the academic and clinical experiences were central to Lewczak’s time in the program, what surprised her most was the community. She expected rigorous coursework and strong mentorship, but did not expect to forge friendships that changed how she understood belonging.

During a difficult personal moment, one of Lewczak’s classmates met her at a coffee shop. What began as a conversation about life became a wide-ranging ethical discussion about behavioral change, social movements, abortion regulation, climate change, and the point at which people become ready to act. Lewczak remembers leaving that conversation with a sense of recognition. “I finally found my people,” she says.

Now preparing to apply to medical school, Lewczak sees the Bioethics program as a formative step toward becoming a physician-bioethicist. Her interests remain grounded in clinical ethics, moral resilience, and the role that bioethicists can play in helping clinicians, patients, and health systems navigate uncertainty with greater care.

For prospective students, her advice is rooted in the promise of the field itself. Bioethics, she says, is still young enough that students who are entering the discipline have the chance to help define what it will become. “The clinicians, the lawyers, the theologians, the abstract thinkers who are in this space right now are the ones who are pioneering it,” she says.

Lewczak’s hope is expansive: that bioethics becomes not a niche discipline, but a widely understood part of medicine, policy, and everyday life. “I believe bioethics is going to change the world,” she says. “I hope every future incoming bioethics student feels that way.”

Written by Bailey Merlin