Ethics
BOSTON CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL
Ethics Associates
Jeffrey Burns, MD, MPH (Ethics Advisory Committee Co-Chair)
Dr. Jeffrey Burns is Chief of the Division of Critical Care Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital and Associate Professor of Anesthesia (Pediatrics) at Harvard Medical School. He co-chairs Children’s Ethics Advisory Committee and is Program Director for the Fellowship in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.
Dr. Burns earned his medical degree from Tufts University School of Medicine and a Master of Public Health from Harvard University. He completed his residency in Pediatrics and a fellowship in Pediatric Critical Care at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and is board certified in both Pediatrics and Pediatric Critical Care Medicine. Dr. Burns established and is the Executive Director of the Children’s Hospital Simulator Program, one of the first hospital-based simulator programs for pediatrics in the United States. His research has focused in two domains, ethics controversies and educational innovation in pediatric intensive care, which have been the topics of his numerous national and international lectures.
Dr. Burns’ teaching expertise has been recognized at the local, national and international level. He is the author of nearly 50 manuscripts and book chapters. His research has focused on bringing empirical study to decision-making controversies at the end-of-life in the intensive care unit. He teaches medical ethics to the first year medical students at Harvard Medical School, as well as the Fellowship in Medical Ethics. Publications
Theonia Boyd, MD
Dr. Theonia Boyd is the Director of the Division of Anatomic Pathology in the Department of Pathology at Boston Children's Hospital, a full time staff pathologist at Children's Hospital, and a part time staff pathologist in the Division of Women's and Perinatal Pathology within the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Boyd is an Associate Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Boyd completed Fellowship in Medical Ethics in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School during the 2009-2010 academic year. She has been a member of the Children's Hospital Ethics Advisory Committee since 2008. Her interests in medical ethics include ethical issues surrounding autopsy pathology and reporting, and ethical issues regarding the scope of expert witness testimony in medical malpractice.
Stephen Brown, MD
Dr. Stephen Brown grew up in Philadelphia and received his B.A. and M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed a residency in Diagnostic Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and fellowships in Pediatric Radiology and Pediatric Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiology at Boston Children's Hospital. His clinical interests include pediatric body imaging, obstetrical imaging, and imaging-guided tumor ablation. Dr. Brown and his colleagues performed the first radio frequency ablation of a kidney tumor in a child.
Dr. Brown completed the 2003 Fellowship in Medical Ethics in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has been a member of the Children’s Hospital Ethics Advisory Committee since 2002, and has been an Associate Clinical Ethicist in the Office of Ethics at Children's Hospital since 2004. From 2005 to 2007, he served as Research Subject Advocate for Ethics and Education for the Children’s Hospital General Clinical Research Center. He is a member of the Professionalism Committee of the Radiologic Society of North America. In 2006, he was the recipient of a Children's Hospital Faculty Career Development Award, and was named an Eleanor and Miles Shore 50th Anniversary Scholar in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. In 2007, he was a national finalist for the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics. His interests include the ethical implications of emerging prenatal technologies, professionalism, conflicts of interest, and the distinction between research, innovation, and standard practice. Publications
David Coulter, MD
David Diamond, MD
Dr. David Diamond is a Professor of Surgery (Urology) at Harvard Medical School, Senior Associate in Urology at Children's and Associate Clinical Ethicist at Children’s Hospital. He was a Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School from 2001-2002. He has a strong interest in ethical issues related to disorders of sexual differentiation and gender assignment and has published and lectured on this subject. He is Co-Director of the GeMS (Gender Management Service) at Children’s Hospital. Publications
Steven Joffe, MD, MPH
Dr. Steven Joffe is Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a pediatric hematologist/oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Children’s Hospital in Boston. Dr. Joffe attended Harvard College, received his medical degree from the University of California at San Francisco, and received his public health degree from UC Berkeley. He trained in pediatrics at UCSF and undertook fellowship training in pediatric hematology/oncology at DFCI and Children’s Hospital in Boston. He was a Fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School in 1998, and was also a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University in 2000-1. His clinical work is in the area of stem cell transplantation in children.
His research addresses the many ethical challenges that arise in the conduct of clinical investigation, both in pediatric oncology and in other areas of medicine and science. He is the principal investigator of NIH and foundation grants to study children’s decision-making capacity regarding clinical research participation, return of individual genetic results to participants in epidemiologic cohort studies, the roles and responsibilities of PIs in multicenter randomized trials, and accountability in the clinical research enterprise. He currently serves as Chair of the Children’s Oncology Group Bioethics Committee and as a member of both the FDA’s Pediatrics Ethics Subcommittee and the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections.
Judith Johnson, JD
Judith Johnson is currently a clinical ethics associate in the Office of Ethics; a member of the Ethics Advisory Committee at Children’s Hospital Boston; and a member of the Harvard teaching hospitals’ ethics leadership group. Judy worked for more than two decades as a health care attorney, including serving as Vice President of Legal Services for New England Medical Center Hospitals, Inc., where she also served as an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of Community Health at Tufts University School of Medicine, teaching Medical Ethics and leading first year medical students in problem based learning classes. Judy also worked at the law firms of Ropes & Gray and Choate, Hall & Stewart, representing hospitals, nursing homes, home care agencies, and physician groups in a variety of health law matters. She represented clients before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in leading patients’ rights cases (Norwood Hospital v. Munoz, Brophy v. New England Sinai Hospital and Custody of a Minor). She received a Certificate in Health Care Ethics at the University of Washington in Seattle and completed the ethics fellowship at the Harvard Medical School. Among many publications, her most recent book co-authored with Robert Truog and David Browning is entitled, “Talking with Patients and Families about Medical Error: a Guide for Education and Practice” (The Johns Hopkins University Press 2011).
Daniel Kamin, MD
Dr. Daniel Kamin completed a three-year fellowship in pediatric gastroenterology and nutrition at Harvard (2003-2005). He then joined Children’s Hospital Boston faculty as a staff gastroenterologist and served as the first medical director of the intestinal transplantation program, from July 2005 to July 2010, during which time they performed fourteen intestinal transplants.
As the only center in the New England area with an active intestinal transplant program, they were able to offer a rare procedure to unusual patients in great need, without their having to travel to distant centers away from family and friends.
Extending the clinical work Dr. Kamin has done in intestinal transplantation, he completed a year-long fellowship in post-graduate medical ethics at Harvard Medical School 2008-2009. He is a standing member of the Ethics Advisory Committee at Children’s Hospital Boston, and is working with the Pediatric Transplant Center at Boston Children's Hospital on developing guidelines for fair and reasonable patient selection.
Over the past three years Dr. Kamin has participated in Harvard Medical School’s (HMS) first and second-year teaching and evaluation modules. As a newcomer to co-directing the gastrointestinal physiology section for HMS first year Integrated Human Physiology Course, he has continued to enjoy the process of learning and teaching medicine. Dr. Kamin is also an associate program director for the Fellowship in Gastroenterology and Nutrition at Children’s Hospital Boston, where he coordinates major aspects of the Program.
Jennifer Kesselheim, MD, MEd, MBE
Dr. Jennifer Kesselheim is a pediatric hematologist-oncologist who cares for patients at both Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital Boston. Dr. Kesselheim earned a Masters degree in Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania and completed the Fellowship in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School. She also completed a Masters degree in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
In addition to her clinical roles, Dr. Kesselheim currently serves as the Associate Ethicist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where she co-chairs the Ethics Advisory Committee. In addition, she has taken on leadership roles as the Medical Educator in the Office of Graduate Medical Education at Children’s Hospital Boston and the Associate Fellowship Program Director for Education at the Dana-Farber/Children's Hospital Cancer Center. As an educator she develops and directs curricula on ethics, humanism, and professionalism for residents and fellows throughout the Harvard medical community.
Dr. Kesselheim also pursues a career in clinical investigation. She conducts research to explore how to teach ethics and medical professionalism to physicians and her work has appeared in Pediatrics, the American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Graduate Medical Education, and the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
Konstantinos Papadakis, MD
Dr. Papadakis is a Staff General Pediatric Surgeon at Children's Hospital Boston. He completed his General Surgery residency at Brown University, trained in Pediatric Surgery at Tufts Medical Center, and has also completed his fellowship at Boston Children's Hospital.
Dr. Papadakis has many interests in the interface of surgery and ethics, especially in the dilemmas of neonatal surgery as they relate to the limits of viability. Currently, he is involved in implementing the pediatric surgery ethics curriculum for their fellowship trainees.
Jehanna Peerzada, MD, MPH
Dr. Jehanna Peerzada is a pediatric urgent care and hospitalist physician with fellowship training in clinical research and bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. Her clinical time is spent either in the emergency department at Children’s Hospital Boston or as the staff pediatrician at Norwood Hospital, covering the inpatient ward, nursery, and emergency department.
Dr. Peerzada’s activities in ethics have included participation on the hospital ethics committee at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC and Children’s Hospital Boston, ethics consultation, and teaching ethics to all levels of medical trainees. Her research has examined neonatologists’ practices and attitudes towards the delivery room resuscitation of very preterm infants in New England and Sweden, which she has presented in both countries. She is currently writing a review of cases involving withdrawal of artificial hydration and nutrition from children, and is proposing a study of physician practices and attitudes towards withdrawing artificial nutrition and hydration from seriously ill infants and children.
Sadath Sayeed, MD, JD
Dr. Sadath Sayeed is a neonatologist and attending physician in the Department of Newborn Medicine and an Associate Clinical Ethicist in the Office of Ethics at Children’s Hospital Boston. He also holds a primary academic appointment in the Division of Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School. His academic scholarship has focused on ethical and legal analyses of medical decision-making for newborns in the United States. Currently, his work focuses on the social determinants of health in developing countries, with emphasis on newborns and infants. He is also interested in medical ethics education both here and in developing countries and is pursing interdisciplinary work related to prioritization of health care under conditions of resource scarcity. He is a member of the Steering Committee for the Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health. In addition to teaching 1st year medical students at Harvard, he is responsible for directing the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) educational program at the Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital and recently, has been named Director for RCR education through the newly NIH-funded CTSA/Catalyst program.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Dr. Sayeed received his medical training at the University Of Iowa College Of Medicine, trained in pediatrics and neonatology at the University of California, San Francisco, and received his law degree from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, he taught bioethics at the University of California, Berkeley Law School and UCSF. Publications
Erin Talati, MD, MA, JD
Robert D. Truog, MD
Dr. Robert Truog is Professor of Medical Ethics, Anaesthesia and Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He has practiced pediatric intensive care medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston for more than 25 years, including serving as Chief of the Division for more than a decade.
Dr. Truog is Director of Clinical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, where he has a leadership role in creating and teaching an ethics curriculum from the undergraduate level to postgraduate continuing medical education. As Executive Director of the Institute for Professionalism and Ethical Practice, he creates and teaches highly interactive seminars to enhance the relational and communication skills of clinicians across a variety of topics, including breaking bad news, discussing organ donation with families, and disclosure of adverse events and medical error. He has published more than 200 articles and books in bioethics and related disciplines. His recent books include “Talking with Patients and Families about Medical Error: A Guide for Education and Practice (2010, JHUP), and Death, Dying, and Organ Transplantation (2012, Oxford). Publications
Meredith van der Velden, MD
Dr. Meredith van der Veldenis an Assistant in Critical Care Medicine and Instructor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School as well as an Associate Ethicist through the Office of Ethics at Children’s Hospital Boston. She earned her B.S. in Biology from the University of Kentucky, and her M.D. from the University Of Kentucky College Of Medicine.
She completed her residency in Pediatrics through the Boston Combined Residency Program at Children’s Hospital Boston and Boston Medical Center in 2005. Dr. van der Velden went on to complete her fellowship in pediatric critical care at Children’s Hospital Boston in 2008. In 2007 she completed the Fellowship in Ethics at the Division of
Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School. She also serves as a member of the Ethics Advisory Committee at Children’s Hospital Boston. Dr. van der Velden’s research interests include the evaluation of end-of-life decision-making in neurologically injured patients in the pediatric ICU.
David Waisel, MD
Dr. David Waisel is an Associate Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and a pediatric anesthesiologist at Children’s Hospital Boston. Among other duties, he serves as the program director for the largest pediatric anesthesiology fellowship in the United States, as the chair of physician education for the Program for Patient Safety and Quality at Children’s Hospital Boston, and as an Associate Clinical Ethicist at Children’s Hospital Boston. He has published more than 50 manuscripts, reviews, chapters and editorials and has been invited to give a similar number of national and international presentations. His research centers on ethical issues surrounding informed consent and capital punishment.
