Jenna is entering her sophomore year as a biochemistry major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On campus, she enjoys playing intramural volleyball and flag football, and having conversations about faith and spirituality with people on the quad. At home, she has enjoyed spending time with family and playing piano and tennis. Jenna grew up and currently lives in Buffalo Grove, IL with her dad, mom, and two younger siblings. They attend the Vernon Hills campus of The Orchard Evangelical Free Church.
I am currently passionate about engaging the culture with a biblical understanding of bioethics to result in tangible change. My interest in bioethics was sparked at least in part during the pandemic, when we witnessed the drastic effects of government regulations and guidelines on the lives of ordinary people. During the pandemic, I also had the opportunity to tutor a foster child over Zoom, which helped to open my eyes to some of the systematic brokenness that exists for young people. Recently, I have come to realize more of how science can sometimes resemble a religion. For example, under the category of moral enhancement, I have learned that people may one day turn to drugs as a solution for moral flaws (https://bigthink.com/thinking/moral-enhancement/). Although science can provide much good, we set ourselves up for disappointment when we rely on medicine and biotechnology for hope, freedom from fear and anxiety, and deliverance from death. During this summer's conference, Professor and Vice Chair of Preventive Medicine Research at the University of Pittsburgh Richard Zimmerman helpfully quoted Cornelius Van Til in portraying humanity's fall in Genesis 3 as "an attempt to do without God in every respect", including in science. In our culture's push for greater autonomy, the elevation of man over God comes at the expense of genuine love and justice for the most vulnerable. I hope that biblical bioethics can promote lasting change on the levels of apologetics, educational curriculum, media coverage, and government policy.
I am unsure about what specifically I would like to do in the future. Some pathways that I have considered include education, government work and policy, missionary work, and healthcare. I am also planning to seek a lab on campus within the next couple of years to explore what a career in research might look like.
I will be focusing on familiarizing myself with the field of bioethics and specifically understanding the relationship between biblically-based bioethics and policy formation. In addition to informing my personal convictions on bioethical issues in light of the biblical worldview, I also hope to gain discernment through this internship about whether I would like to pursue a bioethics-focused career in the future. Nevertheless, I am realizing as this internship has progressed that bioethics, and the fundamental understanding of what it means to be an embodied human created by God, will continue to bear weight no matter which career I end up in.
I think I started telling people that I was interested in bioethics at some point during high school, even though I was uncertain about what a career in bioethics actually looked like. I was introduced to CBHD during the summer before my freshman year of college after a friend invited me to her youth group. I had gone with her once or twice before, but on one particular day, her youth group was combining with another youth group in the area, and it just so happened that Bryan and Rebekah Just were with that other youth group (Bryan works for the center). I learned from Bryan's introduction that he worked in bioethics and when I went to talk to him, he told me about CBHD and mentioned that the center offered internships. I think I was drawn to the opportunity to be specifically engaged in the field from a biblical perspective, as well as to the fact that the encounter felt like an act of God's providence.
