ABOUT
Our Mission
Our goal is to provide bioethics training that will directly benefit patients and research participants, and promote the development of ethically sound healthcare policy. We offer training programs that meet the needs of health and legal professionals who work on ethics committees, institutional review boards, and other decision-making bodies that are expected to make important, ethically complex assessments.
Our History
Our bioethics programs are among the earliest in the US, and began in 1995 with the Certificate Program, a collaboration between Montefiore and Columbia led by bioethics pioneers Nancy Dubler and David Rothman. Faculty of the program over the years include a Who's Who of Bioethics and the medical humanities in America: Rita Charon, Barron Lerner, Jeff Blustein, the late John Arras and Adrienne Asch, and many others. Among our hundreds of graduates are numerous leaders in healthcare ethics, many of whom credit the program with dramatically changing the direction of their career. Clinical Ethics has always been a strength of the program, drawing from the decades of cases and faculty experience from Montefiore.
The Masters' Program started in 2010 under the direction of Tia Powell, in collaboration with Ed Stein of Cardozo Law . The MBE offers a more in-depth experience to our former and new students. Our program continues to draw upon a rich mixture of medicine, law, narrative, fiction, and clinical experience to offer our students a unique and nuanced appreciation of ethical challenges in healthcare.
Learning Objectives:
The goal of the Masters’ Program and the Certificate Program is to train future and current professionals to translate bioethical theory into practice, with a focus on service-oriented aspects of bioethics; these include clinical bioethics consultation, health care ethics policy and the ethical practice of research involving human subjects.
Our Students
Our students include doctors, lawyers, nurses, social workers, a range of other professionals, law and medical students and recent college graduates. They have as a common goal the desire to understand and balance the relationship between complicated medical issues and choices and the firmly held values of patients, families and providers.
Alexa Kanbergs:
Why did you choose the Einstein Cardozo Master of Science in Bioethics?
After looking through a number of bioethics programs it became clear that the emphasis of the Einstein Cardozo program was on competencies of practical skill and knowledge, rather than a dominant emphasis on classic philosophy (a priority of other programs). Medical and legal professionals having a grasp on the philosophy that underpins bioethics is important, but what is more useful is experience with navigating cases and being able to apply philosophical frameworks and principles in coming to a solution; a priority of the Einstein-Cardozo Masters program.
Emma Brezel
What was your experience being a full time graduate student in the program?
The workload has been very manageable. The readings are always interesting and cover a wide range of perspectives. The professors will usually assign a couple lay articles or narratives in addition to the seminal academic texts, so we are able to compare established ethical discourse to recent cases. I also have room in my schedule to take law school courses. They are challenging, but it has been an unexpected and fascinating experience.
Beverly Adade:
What is your favorite aspect of the Bioethics program?
I was drawn to the program because of the diverse student body. There are students that range from professionals who are healthcare providers, lawyers, administrators, and newly graduated students. It is a great experience to be amongst other students who have different perspectives on bioethics. I also enjoy taking the elective law classes at Cardozo. The experience has really changed how I look at ethical problems.
Our Faculty and Staff
With our notable faculty and diverse, multidisciplinary programming, we provide the teaching and interactive experiences that allow healthcare and legal professionals to be leaders in the expanding field of bioethics.
Tia Powell
Director
Tia Powell is recognized for her work in ethics education, end of life care, organ transplantation, ethics consultation and ethics policy, especially regarding public health disasters. She has served on several Institute of Medicine workgroups related to disaster response and planning, including becoming co-author of its 2009 report on standards of care in disasters, and co-chair of its current study on access to antibiotics in case of anthrax attack. She was also co-author of the landmark 2007 Chest series of articles on disaster preparation, and has served on the 2010 CDC workgroup assessing pediatric implications of disaster policies. She was formerly the Executive Director of the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, which functions as New York State’s Governor-appointed bioethics commission. She founded the Ethics Consultation Service at Columbia Presbyterian in 1992, and has provided bioethics expertise to numerous groups, including the New York State Cardiac Advisory Committee, the Empire State Stem Cell Ethics Committee, and the federal Secretary's Advisory Committee for Human Research Protections (SACHRP). She is a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and of the New York Academy of Medicine. Dr. Powell is a member of the original faculty of the Certificate Program in Bioethics and the Medical Humanities, and has delighted in teaching bioethics for nearly twenty years.Lauren Flicker
Associate Director
Lauren Sydney Flicker teaches Death & Dying, Personhood, Reproductive Ethics and the Law, and Bioethics and Medical Humanities. Her scholarship focuses on reproductive ethics, ethical issues in end of life care, and ethics consultation. Prior to joining the Center for Bioethics, Professor Flicker was a fellow in the Cleveland Fellowship in Advanced Bioethics, a multi-institutional program administered by the Cleveland Clinic. In 2010, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics and an adjunct professor at Earle Mack School of Law at Drexel University of Philadelphia. She formerly practiced law at Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson in New York.Stacy Govan
Center and Programs Manager
Stacy Govan specializes in finance, tax and grant administration as well as the management of clinical services and educational programs. She has been an Associate at H & R Block for several years and has worked at Lehman College's Office of Research and Sponsored Programs.
Nancy N. Dubler
Senior Associate
Nancy Dubler lectures internationally on a range of bioethics issues, most particularly bioethics mediation and human subjects research. She founded and directed the Bioethics Consultation Service at Montefiore Medical Center (1978-2008) as a support for analysis of difficult clinical cases presenting ethical issues in the health care setting; this service uses mediation as its primary intervention. She also founded and directed the Certificate Program in Bioethics and the Medical Humanities (1995 to 2008). She is the author of numerous articles and books on ethical issues in research with human subjects, termination of care, home care and long-term care, geriatrics, adolescent medicine, prison and jail health care, and AIDS. Her recent books are: Bioethics Mediation: A Guide to Shaping Shared Solutions, with Carol Liebman, Vanderbilt University Press (2011); Ethics for Health Care Organizations: Theory, Case Studies, and Tools, with Jeffrey Blustein and Linda Farber Post (2002); The Ethics and Regulation of Research with Human Subjects, with Coleman, Menikoff and Goldner (Lexis/Nexis, 2005); and Handbook for Health Care Ethics Committees, with Post and Blustein (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2007). She is currently Consultant for Ethics at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, the nation’s largest public hospital system.Alan Fleischman
Professor of Clinical Pediatrics and Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Population Health
Alan Fleischman has published and lectured extensively in many areas of perinatal medicine and has been a pioneer in the field of bioethics and research ethics, emphasizing the rights of individual patients and the responsibilities of health care professionals and organizations. His positions have included, for Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Montefiore Medical Center Professor of Pediatrics and of Epidemiology and Social Medicine, Director of the Division of Neonatology in the Department of Pediatrics. He became Senior Vice President and Medical Director of the March of Dimes Foundation where he developed multiple clinical and research initiatives to prevent preterm birth, infant mortality and birth defects. Dr. Fleischman has been a consultant to the National Institute of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration and Center for Disease Control and Prevention. He is an elected Fellow and a member of the Board of Directors of the Hastings Center and an elected Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. He was also a founding member of the New York State Governor's Task Force on Life and the Law (Bioethics Commission) and served for 27 years.Danielle Spencer
Danielle Spencer is the author of Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity (Oxford University Press, 2020) and co-author of Perkins-Prize-winning The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (OUP, 2017). Academic Director of the Columbia University Master of Science in Narrative Medicine Program, her scholarly and creative work appears in diverse outlets, from The Lancet to Ploughshares. Spencer’s scholarly interests include narrative ethics as well as speculative fiction and bioethics. Formerly artist/musician David Byrne’s Art Director, Spencer holds a B.A. from Yale University, an M.S. in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She is a 2019 MacDowell Fellow and 2020 Yaddo Fellow. www.daniellespencer.comEinstein-Cardozo Bioethics Graduate Education
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