Samantha Adams Festschrift: The Dot at the End of the Funnel—TILT Remembers Samantha Adams

Abstract

When colleagues at The Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) learned of Samantha Adam's death, the shock and sadness unfolded on multiple levels. Sam, as she was known by everyone, had been at TILT for 4 years and, in that time, had become a beloved colleague and friend to many, as well as the leading force and driver for the development of a dedicated health research line at TILT. Sam was in the process of bringing the many strands of her work together from a research and teaching career that explored issues in health through the lens of Science Technology and Society studies (STS), Health Policy, and Medical Informatics. Sam had decided that eHealth would be the umbrella under which she would integrate her research and teaching. Consequently, when she came to TILT, her longstanding interest in medical informatics and online health research readily and naturally transformed into the launch of a rapidly developing research line on eHealth. 1 But as Sam was always quick to point out, "eHealth is not 'one thing'!" "You really cannot talk about the regulation of eHealth or the ethics of eHealthit involves a vast array of different technologies giving rise to different issues." Although we shared this understanding, it was clear that this had become one of Sam's rallying cries, a pet peeve. But at the root of this annoyance was the fact that, as Sam pointed out, not getting your foundational terms right at the outset will significantly lower the depth, quality, and value of the analysis that could be done as a result. It was this kind of insistence on intellectual integrity that guided Sam's work. Some may have experienced it as stubbornness, but the result was indisputable-Sam's research foundations were solid.