Dr. Michael A. Williams is medical director of the LifeBridge Health Brain & Spine Institute in Baltimore. He is former co-chairman of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Ethics Committee. His interest areas include end-of-life care and the ethical issues of organ donation, of intracranial pressure and of hydrocephalus.

The Maryland Healthcare Ethics Committee Network, established by the Law and Health Care Program at the University of Maryland School of Law, serves as a resource for ethics committees. Contact chairwoman Diane Hoffman.

Dr. Robert M. Arnold is director at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine’s Institute for Doctor-Patient Communication. Arnold teaches physician leaders how to educate peers to better communicate regarding ethical, psychosocial and existential issues at the end of life.

Dr. Alexandra Cist, board-certified in internal medicine, pulmonary medicine and critical care medicine, is on staff at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she serves on the ethics task force and other ethics committees.

Lynn Pasquerella is president of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and has written about medical ethics.  She formerly chaired the University of Rhode Island institutional review board.

The National Ethics Committee is a subcommittee of the Executive Committee of VHA’s National Leadership Board. It is not a hospital advisory committee in the traditional sense but is an interdisciplinary group from around the nation, charged to issue reports on ethics-related topics, ranging from resource allocation to impaired-consent capacity. It is monitored by the National Center for […]

Sister Carol Taylor is former director of the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University. She also is a senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and a professor of nursing at Georgetown. Her background is in philosophy, bioethics and nursing. She is experienced in caring for chronically and critically ill patients and their families.

The American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics, based in Boston, aims to be a forum for debate, scholarship and critical thought among professionals who work at the intersection of law, health care and ethics. Contact executive director Ted Hutchinson.

Arthur Caplan is a professor of bioethics and director of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s school of medicine. He co-edited Assisted Suicide: Finding Common Ground.