Tracy Binius, MD, is a Psychosomatic Medicine Fellow at The University of Chicago. She was born in Wisconsin and attended St. Olaf College, graduating with a degree in English. She moved to Chicago and worked as a writer and editor specializing in health care. She then returned to school to complete pre-medical requirements at Northwestern University. She attended Loyola's Stritch School of Medicine, received her MD in 2010, and completed residency in psychiatry at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Keri Brenner (nèe Oxley) MD, MPA, is a psychiatry resident at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Her interests in end-of-life care were sparked while working with Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying in Kolkata, India. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a major in philosophy. At Yale School of Medicine, she completed an honors thesis on the phenomenology of suffering with terminal illness, mentored by Dr. Robert Levine, and received her medical degree. She earned her Master’s in Public Administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School. She has served on the Board of Trustees at the University of Notre Dame from 2005-2008, as a Zuckerman Fellow for Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership from 2007-2008, and as an associate editor of the Harvard Review of Psychiatry 2013-2014. She will begin a fellowship in Palliative Medicine at the University of Chicago in July 2015.
Paul Burcher, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Bioethics and Obstetrics and Gynecology at Albany Medical College. He directs the human reproduction theme for second year medical students and teaches the third and fourth year student course in medical ethics. His publications have focused on the doctor-patient relationship, physician empathy, and more recently on ethical issues in clinical obstetrics, including cesarean delivery on maternal request (CDMR), birth plans, and home birth. He is currently involved in a research project studying cesarean section regret.
Félix Carrier, MD, is a fifth-year psychiatry resident at Laval University, where he also completed medical school. For his undergraduate studies, he attended Cégep of Ste-Foy (Ste-Foy College). He has been interested in Philosophy and Ethics since college and he took a semester off during Clerkships to study philosophy. In the fall of 2014, he will begin clinical practice at Hôtel-Dieu of Lévis, a hospital on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, Canada. In July 2015, he will leave for a one-year full-time Fellowship in France at the University of Tours. He and his wife live near Quebec City and they will have their first baby, a little girl, in the end of September 2014.
David Chang, MD, is a Professor of Surgery at The University of Chicago who specializes in reconstructive surgery in cancer patients. His specific interest and expertise has been in treatment of lymphedema -- chronic swelling of the limbs that occurs in some patients who undergo cancer surgery with lymph node removal and/or receive radiation therapy. Dr. Chang has helped develop and promote procedures such as lymphaticovenular bypass and vascularized lymph node transfers using a surgical microscope to improve the lymphatic drainage. Dr. Chang also has expertise in breast reconstruction and other areas of post-oncologic reconstruction.
David Chooljian, MD, JD, is an Assistant Professor at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine who also practices in the VA Loma Linda Healthcare System. He earned a B.S. in Anthropology from University of California, Los Angeles in 2001. Because of his interest in clinical medical ethics, he became the first M.D.-J.D. program student at Vanderbilt University. Upon graduating in 2007, he went to the Cleveland Clinic for internal medicine residency, followed by a pulmonary and critical care fellowship at Stanford University. He has been a member of the State Bar of California since 2008.
Jessica Duong Wicker, RN, BSN, currently works at The University of Chicago Comer Children's Hospital operating room, where she has recently joined the pediatric cardiac surgical team. She has been at the University of Chicago since 2010. She earned her nursing degree from Chamberlain College of Nursing and she will begin a nurse practitioner program in fall 2015.
Olwen Hahn, MD is an Assistant Professor in the section of hematology-oncology at the University of Chicago. She joined the University of Chicago as an internal medicine resident in 2001, continued training as a fellow in hematology-oncology, and later joined the faculty in 2008. Her specialty is breast cancer. She serves as a scientific officer for a NCI sponsored cooperative group, the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology. Her interests include patient-doctor communication and educating trainees regarding communication skills for conducting difficult conversations.
Kirsten Inducil, RN, BSN, is a BMT staff nurse at the University of Chicago, where she will continue working while pursuing a Masters of Arts degree in Bioethics and Health Policy at Loyola University. After graduating from Boston College in 2009, she worked in oncology and bone marrow transplant in Los Angeles and served on the bioethics committee at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Kyle Karches, MD, is a third-year internal medicine resident at the University of Chicago, where he also completed medical school. He was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio and attended college at the University of Notre Dame, where he studied philosophy and first developed an interest in medical ethics. He looks forward to a career in academic general medicine.
Jennifer Karlin, PhD, is currently finishing her fourth year of medical school at the University of Chicago, where she also received a PhD in the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science (CHSS) and a MA in Anthropology. She has worked as a health care policy analyst, a community integration specialist with disabled adults, and a health care paralegal at the Legal Aid Society. She is also the author of Regeneration: Telling Stories from Our Twenties, published in 2003. Recently, she published an article in Public Culture from her dissertation work entitled “Loss and Gain in Translation: Financial Epidemiology on the South Side of Chicago.”
Julie Lester RN, BSN, IBCLC, has worked since 2012 as a Lactation Consultant in the Women’s Care Center at The University of Chicago Medicine. She has been building a comprehensive lactation program across the continuum of care. She received her certification as an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant in 2008. She graduated from Loyola University in Chicago with a BSN in Nursing in 1996 and began her career in adult nursing. In 1999, she transitioned to University of Chicago where she devoted ten years to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit as a staff nurse and nursing manager. She also worked at The University of Chicago Medicine and LaRabida for three years as a pediatric nurse case manager.
Yuan (Sophie) Li, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Ethics and Laws of the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing Municipality, Southwest China. She received her B.A. from Shaanxi Normal University in 2001, her M.Ed. in 2004, and PhD in 2007 from Fourth Military Medical University. She teaches and researches in the fields of medical ethics and medical humanities.
Michael Nabozny, MD, is a General Surgery resident at the University of Wisconsin. After completing his undergraduate work in chemistry at the University of Maryland in 2004, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in northern Namibia teaching mathematics and science. He then returned to upstate New York and graduated from the University of Rochester School of Medicine in 2011. His ethics-related research includes improving decision-making and communication regarding high risk surgery.
Anna Piotrowski, MD, is a 4th year Psychiatry resident and Chief Resident at the University of Chicago. She earned her BS in Genetics and graduated with honors from the University of California, Davis and then earned her MD from the University of California, Irvine. Currently, she is conducting two IRB-approved research studies. Her interests include Psychosomatic Medicine, Women’s Mental Health, and Organized Medicine.
Shuddhadeb Ray, MD, is a surgery resident at Barnes-Jewish Hospital / Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He received his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering from Washington University and completed his medical degree at the University of Kansas. He is completing a two-year research fellowship as the American College of Surgeons Emerson Scholar-in-Residence at Washington University focusing on surgical ethics, patient safety, and quality improvement. He is concurrently completing a Masters in Population Health Sciences.
Catherine Rockwood, MD, is a fourth-year Psychiatry Resident at the University of Chicago. After attending Wellesley College, she worked in Washington, D.C. for an international law and lobbying firm. She earned her MD from Tel Aviv University in Israel. She has participated in research for NICHD Study of Early Childcare, and through OHSU in Alzheimer’s disease and Multiple Sclerosis.
Robert Sebesta, LCSW, is the Integrated Ethics Program Officer at Central Texas Veterans Health Care System, where he has worked for the past three years providing therapy for combat veterans with PTSD. He has practiced clinical social work for twelve years and has worked on ethics committees for the last seven. He worked for nine years at Austin State Hospital, a public inpatient psychiatric facility, where he chaired the ethics committee for over three years. He was also appointed to the Texas DSHS Dangerousness Review Board.
Puneet Singh, MD, is currently a General Surgery Resident at the University of Chicago. She obtained an AB in Biology with a Spanish minor from Washington University of St. Louis in 2007 and graduated from The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine in 2011.
Hollis Walker, MD, is completing his first year of Hematology/Oncology fellowship training at the University of Chicago. He obtained his BA in Public Health at The Johns Hopkins University and earned his MD at Case Western Reserve University, where he also completed his medicine residency training. In the last few years, he worked on a project in the Department of Bioethics at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation investigating the ethical implications of returning large scale genetic testing results to patients.
Catherine Walsh, MD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Plastic Surgery at Loma Linda University in California. She graduated from The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, trained in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, and completed a hand fellowship at the University of New Mexico. She has a thriving hand and reconstructive surgery practice and she is actively engaged in the ethics case conferences at Loma Linda. She is interested in both medical student and resident education and the development of a strong ethics curriculum at Loma Linda.
Siwen (Wendy) Zang is currently a medical student specializing in ophthalmology in Beijing, China and a resident at Peking University Third Teaching Hospital. She will graduate with an MD next year. In 2012, she attended the program “Multi-Center Study on Curriculum Development Regarding Professionalism, Medical Ethics and Doctor-Patient Communication” led by Dr. Renslow Sherer, a Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago. She is interested in learning more about medical ethics.