
Senior Research Assistant and PhD student
Miss Ruthie Jeanneret is a PhD Student in the Australian Centre for Health Law Research, Faculty of Business and Law, supervised by Dr Eliana Close, Professor Lindy Willmott and Professor Ben White. Ruthie’s PhD is on the topic of patient and family perspectives on the regulation of voluntary assisted dying in Australia and Canada. Her PhD is part of the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project, Enhancing end-of-life decision-making: Optimal regulation of voluntary assisted dying (2020-2024, headed by Professor Ben White).
As part of her PhD project, Ruthie will be conducting interviews with individual patients and their family members in Australia and Canada. Interviews aim to understand individual patients’ and families’ perspectives and experiences of how voluntary assisted dying is regulated (i.e. how laws, policies, and other mechanisms are working in practice). Interviews also aim to understand the role that patients and families play in influencing how voluntary assisted dying regimes operate. The experiences of individuals and family members in Australia and Canada will be compared and contrasted, in order to contribute to recommendations for how voluntary assisted dying can be better regulated.
Background
Ruthie graduated from the University of Tasmania with a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws (First Class Honours in Law) in 2017. She was the valedictorian of her class. Ruthie’s Honours thesis was on the topic of substance use by women during pregnancy. After finishing her undergraduate studies, Ruthie completed a Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice in 2018. During this time, Ruthie worked as a research assistant in the Centre for Law and Genetics at the University of Tasmania, including on an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant project, Genomic Data Sharing: Issues in Law, Research Ethics and Society (2018 – 2021).
In August 2018, Ruthie began working as a litigation lawyer in a private law firm in Hobart, Tasmania, where her practice centred primarily on commercial litigation, but also on criminal law and guardianship and administration matters. Ruthie then moved to Brisbane at the start of 2020 where she worked in a private law firm in the Litigation and Dispute Resolution team, where her work centred on commercial and consumer law disputes.
Ruthie came to QUT at the end of 2020, where she worked as a Senior Research Assistant on a project involving developing voluntary assisted dying training for doctors and nurse practitioners involved in voluntary assisted dying in Western Australia. Ruthie has since undertaken roles as a Research Assistant and Sessional Academic, and is tutoring LWS101 – Ethics Law and Health Care in Semester 2, 2021.
Research interests
Ruthie has a strong interest in all aspects of health law and end of life law. Her particular interest is in voluntary assisted dying.