Gail Geller, ScD, MHS

In addition to her work in genetics, she has longstanding interests in the areas of medical socialization, provider-patient communication under conditions of uncertainty, and cultural differences in attitudes toward health and disease. These themes are reflected in Dr. Geller’s other substantive areas of scholarship: the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and the role of palliative care in chronic diseases. She received one of the highly coveted NIH “challenge” grants to explore the integration of palliative care in the management of children, young adults and families affected by chronic, life-threatening disorders (muscular dystrophy and sickle cell disease). She received a prestigious Kornfeld Fellowship to explore the intersection of bioethics and CAM. She has served as co-director of the educational component of the Johns Hopkins CAM Center, ethics representative on the Data Safety & Monitoring Board of the National Center for Complementary & Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), and adjunct faculty at the Tai Sophia Institute in their Master’s Program in Transformative Leadership and Social Change.

Dr. Geller also has longstanding interests in ethics education. She served as Co-Deputy Director of the Greenwall Fellowship Program in Bioethics & Health Policy until 2012, and now as the Berman Institute’s Director of Education Initiatives oversees the Hecht-Levi Fellowship Program in Bioethics, the Masters in Bioethics and the Bioethics Intensives.

In the medical curriculum at Johns Hopkins, she currently oversees the “Culture of Medicine” core theme, which includes the ethics and professionalism, cultural competence and health disparities “Horizontal Strands”. In addition, she co-directs or serves as faculty in four medical school courses.  In the required Scholarly Concentration course, she co-directs the concentration called Humanism, Ethics and the ‘Art’ of Medicine (HEART).  She also co-directs the required Integrative Medicine course. Two other courses are elective.  She co-directs the Healer’s Art and serves as faculty in the Medical Humanities & Social Medicine elective. As former Co-director of a Fogarty International Center training grant in China, Dr. Geller taught young Chinese geneticists about the social, psychological, cultural and ethical components of their research.

In 1991, through a Chateaubriand Fellowship from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Geller was a visiting scientist in Paris where she studied obstetricians’ attitudes toward fetal anomaly. She has since served on the Board of Directors of the American Society for Bioethics & Humanities, the scientific review panel for the ELSI Program (Ethical, Legal and Social Issues) at NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute, the Advisory Board of the Center for Genetics Research Ethics and Law (CGREAL) at Case Western Reserve University, and the IOM Committee on the Review of Omics-Based Tests for Predicting Patient Outcomes in Clinical Trials. She was a Consultant to the Ethics Working Group of the National Children’s Study, the Informed Consent Working Group of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing (SACGT), the CDC’s Program in Public Health Genetics, and the Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. She is a Fellow of the Hastings Center.