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Dr Xavier Symons
BA MA PhD
Visiting Research Fellow 2020
Dr Xavier Symons is Director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics of the Australian Catholic University, where he was previously a post-doctoral research fellow, and is also an outgoing post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Human Flourishing Program in the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.
Dr Symons has worked as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Notre Dame Australia and the Australian Catholic University. He completed a Fulbright Future Post-doctoral Scholarship at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute for Ethics in 2021-22 with a research project focused on the ethics of dementia. He has also taught bioethics at the University of Technology Sydney Faculty of Law.
He completed his PhD at the Australian Catholic University in 2020 with a thesis that focused on the ethics of healthcare resource allocation. He also holds degrees from the University of Sydney and the University of Oxford.
Sincerest Thanks for Your Support
Staff are grateful to all those who sustained the Centre in the past by their prayers and the generous financial support from trusts, organisations, communities and especially from individual donors, including the core funding that came through the Day for Life fund and so from the generosity of many thousands of parishioners. We would finally like to acknowledge the support the Centre has received from the Catholic community in Ireland, especially during the pandemic when second collections were not possible.
We would like to emphasise that, though the Centre is now closed, these donations have not been wasted but have helped educate and support generations of conscientious healthcare professionals, clerics, and lay people over almost 50 years. This support has also helped prevent repeated attempts to legalise euthanasia or assisted suicide in Britain and Ireland from 1993 till the end of the Centre’s work on 31 July 2025.