Tessa Holzman

Teaching and Research Staff

Tessa Holzman

BAHons, MSc, MA

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Wagga Wagga
Building 26, Room 216

Tessa recently completed her PhD on the ethical implications of adopting an autonomy-only approach to voluntary assisted dying (VAD). She has published multiple articles and presented at various conferences on this topic, as well as being regularly invited to speak on issues relating to VAD in bioethics settings, such as at the Children’s Bioethics Centre (part of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne) and University of Melbourne’s Health Law and Ethics Network (HLEN). She is also writing a novel on the same topic.

Currently, Tessa is working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow under Professor Stephen Clarke on an ARC Discovery project analysing core concepts that play key roles in emerging ethics debates surrounding VAD in Australia.

During her PhD, Tessa worked as a Teaching Associate and taught the following units:

  • Bioethics, justice, and the law
  • Global bioethics
  • Life, death, and morality
  • Critical thinking
  • Ethics, health, and justice

Tessa’s research has focused largely on ethical issues surrounding VAD and end-of-life decision-making. In 2018, she completed a master’s degree in Bioethics at King’s College London, with a dissertation consisting of an ethical examination of what has become known as the completed life law proposal ongoing in the Netherlands, which advocates for access to VAD options for people who are not severely ill. An adapted version of this dissertation was published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry in 2021.

Following this, she pursued a PhD at Monash University, which used this law proposal as a jumping off point to more generally consider the implications of adopting an autonomy-only approach to VAD, specifically for populations with a complex relationship to autonomy. A chapter of this thesis was published in Bioethics in 2024. During her PhD, Tessa also held positions as an RA on projects focusing on mitochondrial donation, and on using stem cell-based embryo models for research purposes.

Tessa’s research interest in VAD continues as she currently is working as a postdoctoral research fellow on a project considering key concepts in VAD debate in Australia. Her focus here will be to help offer a more comprehensive understanding of concepts often invoked in VAD debate, to contribute to a less polarized and more constructive discussion about ethical issues surrounding VAD policy.