Trustworthiness in a Compromised World
On Wednesday, October 14th from 1-1:50 PM in FXB G12 and online, please join us for the second installment in our Trust and Well-being Seminar Series, featuring Dr. Lauren Taylor.
All are welcome. Lunch provided.
Event Description
Dr. Taylor explores what it means for leaders and institutions to remain worthy of trust when the world is compromised, pressured, and morally messy. Rather than treating trustworthiness as a simple matter of displaying familiar virtues like competence, empathy, or benevolence, this talk asks what trustworthiness can realistically look like under conditions of scarcity, hierarchy, politics, uncertainty, and inherited institutional failure.
Drawing on the metaphor of a lantern, Dr. Taylor argues that leaders rarely have the power to produce “clean” solutions. What they can do is act with integrity: reason honestly with others, name what is hard, separate real constraints from excuses, acknowledge residual harms, and choose the next serious step toward better ground. The talk reframes trust not as something institutions can simply ask for, but as something they earn through disciplined practices of integrity under non-ideal conditions.
Speaker Biography
Lauren Taylor, PhD, MDiv, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, with joint appointments in the Division of Healthcare Delivery Science and the Division of Medical Ethics. Her research examines how healthcare is governed beyond formal law, with particular attention to the institutional, organizational, and market structures that shape access to care, practical freedom, and democratic accountability. She studies how hospitals, health systems, and other stakeholders actively make and remake policy through governance design, delegated authority, political influence, and routine managerial decisions. Dr. Taylor earned her PhD from Harvard Business School, as well as master’s degrees from Harvard Divinity School and the Yale School of Public Health, and is a former AcademyHealth Trust Scholar in Residence and a 2026 Greenwall Faculty Scholar.
Speaker Information
Organizers
ⓘ Harvard Chan School hosts a diverse array of speakers, invited to share both scholarly research and personal perspectives. They do not speak for the School, and hosting them does not imply endorsement of their views, organizations, or employers.