Dr. Clapp is a linguistic and medical anthropologist who uses qualitative methods and social scientific theory to develop empirically tractable frameworks for examining medical ethics. His empirical work focuses on both clinical and research ethics. In the clinical space, he studies medical decision making in elective surgery and intensive care, characterizing how decisions about the initiation or withdrawal of treatment are connected to broader social and cultural processes that must be accounted for to develop informed and impactful ethical models. In the research space, Dr. Clapp has examined how institutional review boards (IRBs) justify their authority in requiring alterations to research protocols as well as how the quality of these stipulations should be assessed. More recently, he has been studying the community consultation process for exception from informed consent (EFIC) research, examining how investigators and their institutions conceive of and operationalize ‘community’ to provide ethical justification for research that does not obtain prospective informed consent from individual patients or their surrogates.

Dr. Clapp’s work has been published in high-impact journals including Annals of Surgery, Social Science & Medicine, Academic Medicine, and American Journal of Kidney Diseases.