Virtual Mentor. February 2005, Volume 7, Number 2.

Contributors

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About the Contributors

Theme issue: Quality of Life and Clinical Decision Making.

This is Virtual Mentor's first international issue (see editor information below). Authors from 6 countries contributed to this exploration of the role that quality-of-life assessments play in health care decision making.

Richard E. Ashcroft, PhD, is a philosopher and medical ethicist. He is reader in biomedical ethics and head of the Medical Ethics Unit at ImperialCollege in London, where he leads research on ethical issues in biomedical research and public health.

John Brazier, MD, is professor of health economics in the section of Health Economics and Decision Science at the School of Health and Related Research at the University of Sheffield. He has worked in the area of economic evaluation of health care for nearly 20 years. His main methodological interests have been in the measurement and valuation of health for economic evaluation. He has served on the National Institute for Clinical Excellence Appraisal Committee and as an expert on the valuing of health on a number of important committees in the UK and USA.

Carl Elliott, MD, PhD, teaches philosophy and bioethics at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (Norton, 2003) and co-editor, with Tod Chambers, of Prozac as a Way of Life (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Thomas Finucane, MD, is professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins and chair of the ethics committee for the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.

Muriel Gillick, MD, is an associate professor in the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention of Harvard Medical School/Harvard Pilgrim. She is a geriatrician and palliative care specialist at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates in Boston.

Tom Koch, MD, PhD, is a gerontologist and medical ethicist living with modest vision and mobility impairments. He has appointments at University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University and serves as a bioethicist for the Canadian Down Syndrome Society (Resource Council). A list of his writings is available at: http://kochworks.com.

Bryan A. Liang, MD, PhD, JD, is executive director and professor, Institute of Health Law Studies, California Western School of Law; co-director, San Diego Center for Patient Safety, VA Medical Center; and adjunct associate professor of anesthesiology, UCSD School of Medicine, all in San Diego, CA. His work focuses upon the intersection of law, medicine, and public policy in health care quality, safety, and ethics.

Laura Lin, MBA, is a third-year law student, president of the Health Law Society, and member of the Institute of Health Law Studies, California Western School of Law. She has over 10 years of experience in the health care industry, including 5 years as an officer in the US Navy, teaching in areas of health care delivery and management of clinical research trials in oncology and HIV studies.

Georg Marckmann, MD, studied medicine and philosophy at the University of Tübingen and public health at Harvard School of Public Health. He was a scholar in the postgraduate college Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities in Tübingen from 1992 to 1995. Since 1998 he has been assistant professor at the Institute of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine at the University of Tübingen.

Mary Jane Massie, MD, is an attending psychiatrist and the director of the Barbara White Fishman Center for Psychological Counseling at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center's Breast Center in New York. She specializes in working with women with breast cancer and their families.

Johannes Gobertus Meran, MD, MA, is head of the Department of Internal Medicine at the Hospital Barmherzige Brüder in Vienna, Austria, and professor of internal medicine at the University of Hannover, Germany. He also has an appointment as a professor of pastoral medicine at Heiligenkreuz, Austria. He received his MA in medical law and ethics in 1995 at the Kings College in London. His medical speciality certification is in haematology and oncology.

Erik Nord, PhD, specializes in health economics. He is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo. Some of his main publications are accessible at: http://www.eriknord.no/engelsk/WELCOME.htm.

Ludger Schöls, MD, received his training as a neurologist at the Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany. He holds the professor chair for clinical neurogenetics at the Center of Neurology and Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tübingen. His special interests include hereditary ataxias and spastic paraplegias.

Alfred Simon, PhD, is a medical ethicist and is the executive director of the German Academy for Ethics in Medicine, in Goettingen, Germany.

Elly A. Stolk, MSc is a researcher at the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Germany, with an appointment at the Institute for Medical Technology Assessment. Dr Stolk's main interest is in the measurement of individual and social preferences for informing health care decision-making.

Peter Ubel, MD, is professor of medicine and psychology, director of the Program for Improving Health Care Decisions at the University of Michigan and a staff physician at the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Medical Center. His research utilizes the tools of decision psychology to explore health care controversies.  He is author of Pricing Life: Why It’s Time for Health Care Rationing (MIT Press, 2000) and is currently writing a book about emotional resilience.

Floortje E. van Nooten, MSc, is a researcher at the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Germany, with an appointment at the Institute for Medical Technology Assessment. Dr van Nooten’s main interest is in the measurement of individual and social preferences for informing health care decision-making.

Bernd E. Will, MD, is an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University Hospital of Tübingen, Germany. His training is in internal medicine, conservative orthopaedics, physical therapy and neurosurgery. His special interests lie in the field of hydrocephalus therapy, paediatric neurosurgery, psychosomatics, and neuropsychology.

John Wyatt, MD, is professor of neonatal pediatrics and a consultant neonatologist at University College London. His research interests include the mechanisms, consequences, and prevention of perinatal brain injury and the philosophical, social, and religious background to ethical dilemmas in perinatology.

Staff contributor

Fritz Allhoff

Theme Issue Editor
Matthis Synofzik is a student of medicine and philosophy. He is a research assistant in the Department of Ethics and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cognitive Neurology at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tubingen.