Meet the team
Dr Jim Baxter, Professional Ethics Consultancy Manager. Jim is a full-time ethics consultant and experienced project manager with over ten years’ experience helping organisations and individuals to understand and apply in practice the core principles governing their work, as expressed in Codes of Ethics. He works on our ethical review and consultancy services, training/continuing professional development, and commissioned research. His work with organisations includes the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng), the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA), the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII), the Chartered Banker Institute and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), Banking Standards Board (BSB) and Commonwealth Secretariat. He has provided clarity, support and challenge to members, bringing Codes of Ethics to life and encouraging a practical, dynamic engagement with ethical principles and values.
Dr Jamie Dow, Lecturer & Development Director. Jamie is Development Director for the Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied (IDEA) Centre, leading on large scale consulting projects. He has also been Principal Investigator, Leading Minds Research Project, since Sept 2014. Jamie's main research interest is how influence should be exercised by human beings on one another, and specifically on what kinds of expertise in persuasion are valuable to cultivate in oneself and others.
Dr Elizabeth Ellis, Lecturer and Consultant in Applied Ethics. Her particular topics of focus are the ethics of tax avoidance and the ethics of economic sanctions.
Dr Joshua Hobbs, Lecturer and Consultant in Applied Ethics. Josh combines lecturing with an outwards-facing consultancy role conducting commissioned ethics research and training for professional clients. He is primarily interested in the role of emotions in understanding our obligations to others, the apparent motivation gap facing cosmopolitan duties, and the legitimacy of nudge and strategies of 'sentimental education' as means to encourage moral action.
Dr Robbie Morgan, Lecturer and Consultant in Applied Ethics. Robbie’s teaching focuses on engineering and medical ethics. He leads teaching by IDEA: The Ethics Centre at the Leeds-SWJTU Joint School in Chengdu, China, which currently takes place across five engineering degree programs. He also leads IDEA’s delivery of ethics training to PhD and EngD candidates at Centres of Doctoral Training across the UK, focused on topics in engineering, mathematics, medicine, and related subjects. In his research, Robbie is interested in the ways that questions in epistemology (the study of knowledge) and conceptual analysis (the clarification and elucidation of concepts) bears on ethical controversies, especially related to sex and relationships. His recent research includes projects on the meaning of ‘sexualisation’, the ways that changing language can inhibit our ability to understand and communicate about the world, and what it is to touch someone through something, such as clothing. Prior to working at the University of Leeds, Robbie served as a teaching fellow at the University of Sheffield, as a trustee of a student’s union, and in an administrative role supporting disciplinary hearings at a professional regulator.
Dr Sean Sinclair, Teaching Fellow and Consultant in Applied Ethics. He is interested in analysing public debates about policy issues, and in improving the quality of public debate. Specifically, he is interested in Argument Analysis as a tool for understanding the values that motivate and divide people on policy issues. He is also interested in professional ethics; specifically, how to teach professional trainees to think about difficult situations sensitively and intelligently by posing hard dilemmas where different principles come into conflict.