Leadership


AUSN has three key leaderships sectors that are involved in governance of the organization: the President, the Board of Governors and the Faculty Senate. All major changes to the University require the approval of both the Faculty Senate and the Board of Governors.  We also have a Board of Advisers to provide additional input and ideas, and a Student Association.

Professor Darryl R.J. Macer, Ph.D., Hon.D.

President

Dr. Macer grew up in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and is one of the founding persons in the academic field of bioethics. He has a degree of Bachelor of Science with first class honours in Biochemistry from Lincoln College, University of Canterbury, New Zealand in 1983. He was granted a Cambridge Prince of Wales Scholarship to move to Cambridge, U.K where he completed a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and Trinity College, University of Cambridge, U.K. in 1987. 

Dr. Macer served as UNESCO Regional Adviser for a decade before cofounding AUSN. He has a Ph.D. from University of Cambridge, UK and is determined to decolonize education.

He has worked in UK, New Zealand, Japan, Italy, Thailand and USA. Dr. Macer is a world renowned scholar, who served from 2004 until early 2013 as UNESCO Regional Adviser for Social and Human Sciences in Asia and the Pacific, also heading UNESCO Regional Unit for Social and Human Sciences in Asia and the Pacific (RUSHSAP), UNESCO Bangkok. He was responsible for coordinating programmes in the 46 countries of Asia-Pacific region, from the Pacific Islands, to Japan, Central Asia. This included countries like China and India with over a billion citizens, to Niue, with 10,000 people in their population. Many have significant indigenous populations, with countries like Papua New Guinea that has a population of 5 million people and 850 official languages. In 2013 he moved to USA to co-found AUSN as the Provost, and was elected President in 2015.  

Dr. Macer was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Kumamoto University, Japan in 2009, in philosophy. Professor Macer is credited with over three hundred academic publications (50 books; 240 Peer Reviewed papers in academic journals and books; and many other academic publications in academic journals).His publications are available.

Dr. Macer also serves or has served as an affiliated professor in the University of Kumamoto, Japan; the Institute for Investigation in Bioethics (IIB), Monterrey, Mexico; the Center for Biology and Society, Arizona State University (ASU), USA; the United Nations University (UNU), Japan (since 2002) amongst other Universities. Dr. Macer is also the Secretary of the Asian Bioethics Association, and edits two international peer-reviewed journals.

He was the youngest member of the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee from 1993-1998, and served as a member of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) Committee and the Board of the International Association of Bioethics for a decade. 

Prof. Macer's Editorial in the September 2017 issue of the American Journal of Bioethics (pdf file) introduces the rationale for the AUSN PhD degree program and the boundaries of Bioethics, Public Health Ethics and Environmental Ethics. 

Email: president@ausoverignnations.org