Ruth Gaare Bernheim, an attorney and public health expert, is associate director of the University of Virginia Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life. She has served as an adviser to numerous hospital ethics boards and has taught a course on ethical issues in the evolving care delivery system.

Stanley Joel Reiser is faculty of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health, Austin Regional Campus, as adjunct professor, and a visiting professor of physician assistant studies and of health policy at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D.C. He co-edited Integrity in Health […]

Anne Griswold Peirce is a professor of nursing at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. She published the paper “Some Considerations about Decisions and Decision-Makers in Hospital Ethics Committees” in the Oct. 14, 2004, issue of the Online Journal of Health Ethics.

Dr. John Collins Harvey, a physician with a doctorate in theology, is senior research scholar and professor emeritus of medicine of the Georgetown University Center for Clinical Bioethics in Washington, D.C. His bioethics interests include withdrawal of treatment, advance directives, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Contact him via the website.

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.