Person Type: Faculty

Dr. Unguru is a pediatric hematologist/oncologist with joint faculty appointments at The Herman and Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital at Sinai and The John Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, where he is a Core Faculty member. He is also Associate Professor in the School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University. His B.A. in historical studies and M.A. with a concentration in the history of medicine and medical ethics were granted at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Dr. Unguru also received a Master of Science (valedictorian) in interdisciplinary studies in biological and physical science at Touro College / Barry Z. Levine School of Health Sciences. He earned his M.D. (valedictorian) at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology / Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. He completed his pediatric residency at the Children’s Hospital at Sinai and his pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC. Dr. Unguru was a postdoctoral Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Unguru is board certified both in pediatrics and in pediatric hematology/oncology.

Dr. Unguru’s research interests include clinical and research ethics. His scholarship and publications have focused on the role of children and providers in facilitating shared decision-making, end-of-life decision-making, allocation of scarce lifesaving medications, and ethics education. Dr. Unguru has served as a consultant to the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Pediatric Research, the American Medical Association Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, the Food Drug and Administration, and the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He is on the Editorial Board of Pediatric Ethicscope and serves as a peer reviewer for leading academic medical journals. Dr. Unguru is Chair of the Children’s Oncology Group, Bioethics Steering Committee and past member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Ethics Committee.

Dr. Unguru is the Chairman of the Ethics Committee at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore where he implemented and directs a clinical ethics curriculum for the pediatric house staff at The Herman and Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital at Sinai. He is past recipient of “Teacher of the Year” as chosen by the pediatric house staff at The Herman and Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Unguru leads a multidisciplinary, transnational working group examining the ethical and policy implications of chemotherapy shortages in childhood cancer and is a member of the Maryland health system consortium tasked with operationalizing scarce resource allocation processes for public health catastrophes, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Select Media Appearances

New York Times, “Drug Shortages Forcing Hard Decisions on Rationing Treatments” (Jan. 29, 2016)
NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, “Shortages of Children’s Cancer Drugs and How to Allocate Them” (Feb. 1, 2016)
MSNBC, “Colorado governor signs nation’s first ‘Right to Try’ law” (May 18, 2014)

Hilary Bok, PhD

Cynda Hylton Rushton, PhD, RN

Dr. Rushton’s seminal work on nurse suffering and moral distress was selected for inclusion in the U.S. Nursing Ethics History project chronicling the evolution of nursing ethics in the United States. As part of her RWJ Fellowship, she also tested an intervention to reduce moral distress and burnout by cultivating resilience in nurses working in critical care, oncology and neonatal/pediatrics. Dr. Rushton is currently designing, implementing and evaluating the Mindful Ethical Practice and Resilience Academy (MEPRA) to build moral resilience in novice nurses. Her forthcoming book, Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Health Care, to be published by Oxford University Press aims to transform current approaches for addressing moral distress by focusing on innovative methods to cultivate moral resilience and designing a culture in health care that supports ethical practice.

Dr. Rushton is also an internationally recognized expert in ethics and palliative and end-of-life care. In 2001, she received the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses Pioneering Spirit Award for her work in advancing palliative care across the life-span. Dr. Rushton was appointed by Maryland’s governor as the first chair of the State Council on Quality Care at the End-of-Life and served from 2002-2008. She has provided leadership to a variety of national projects focusing on palliative and end-of-life care, including the National Nursing Academy on Palliative and End-of-Life Care Open Society Institute (PDIA), an innovative, experiential interdisciplinary communication training model (HRSA), the Initiative for Pediatric Palliative Care (IPPC) a research, education and quality improvement project, the End of Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) and the Upaya Institute’s Being With Dying Professional training program. Dr. Rushton served as a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Increasing Organ Donation and as a consultant to the IOM’s project “When Children Die.” She also served on the board of directors of the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (CTAC). She led (with Dr. Gail Geller) an international collaboration to improve the lives of children affected by life-threatening neuromuscular diseases and a related project, focusing on the ethical issues faced by neuromuscular clinicians.

In 2008 and 2014, Dr. Rushton was honored as one of Maryland’s Top 100 Women. She is also an American Academy of Nursing’s Edge Runner and in 2014 received the Milestone Award for Bioethics Leadership from the Centre for Health Care Ethics at Lakehead University. Dr. Rushton is a Fellow of the Hastings Center and the American Academy of Nursing.

Dr. Rushton received her Master’s of Science in Nursing, with specialization as a pediatric clinical nurse specialist, from the Medical University of South Carolina. She completed her undergraduate degree in nursing at the University of Kentucky and received a doctorate in nursing at the Catholic University of America, with a concentration in bioethics. Dr. Rushton is the recipient of three post-doctoral fellowships: a Robert Wood Johnson Nurse Executive Fellowship (2006-2009), a Kornfeld Fellowship in end-of-life, ethics and palliative care (2000), and a Mind and Life Institute Fellowship in Contemplative Science (2013-2014).

Joseph A. Carrese, MD, MPH, FACP

Joseph Carrese, MD, MPH, FACP is Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, a member of the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, and a core faculty member of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

Dr. Carrese’s scholarship focuses on clinical ethics and professionalism, with a particular interest in medical education, examining ethical issues in the context of cultural diversity and clinical ethics consultation. Dr. Carrese’s peer-reviewed articles have been published in leading medical and bioethics journals, such as JAMA, BMJ, CHEST, Academic Medicine, the Hastings Center Report, the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, the American Journal of Bioethics and Medical Education. Dr. Carrese has been a visiting professor at several academic medical institutions and he has been invited to speak at many national and international meetings.

Dr. Carrese was on the Board of Directors for the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities from 2012-15. In 2012 Dr. Carrese was a founding Board member and Chair-elect of the Academy for Professionalism in Healthcare (APHC). From 2013-2015 he was Chair of the Board of Directors of APHC and he was the immediate past-Chair 2016-18.

Dr. Carrese received a National Award for Scholarship in Medical Education at the Society of General Internal Medicine annual meeting in April 2008 for his body of work in the area of clinical ethics education. From 2009-2014 Dr. Carrese was a member of the ASBH standing committee on Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs (CECA) and in October 2011 he received the ASBH Presidential Citation Award for his work on this committee. Dr. Carrese is a Fellow of the Hastings Center.

Dr. Carrese is Chair of the Ethics Committee at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, Chair of an Institutional Review Board at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and primary care doctor to a panel of patients seen at the Bayview Medical Offices internal medicine clinic on the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center campus.

Dr. Carrese graduated from Williams College and the University at Buffalo School of Medicine. He completed a fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he studied medical ethics and anthropology. Dr. Carrese joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1994.

Nancy E. Kass, ScD

Dr. Kass is coeditor (with Ruth Faden) of HIV, AIDS and Childbearing: Public Policy, Private Lives (Oxford University Press, 1996).

She has served as consultant to the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and to the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Kass currently serves as the Chair of the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative Central IRB; she previously co-chaired the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Committee to develop Recommendations for Informed Consent Documents for Cancer Clinical Trials and served on the NCI’s central IRB. Current research projects examine improving informed consent in human research, ethical guidance development for Ebola and other infectious outbreaks, and ethics and learning health care. Dr. Kass teaches the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s course on U.S. and International Research Ethics and Integrity, she served as the director of the School’s PhD program in bioethics and health policy from its inception until 2016, and she has directed (with Adnan Hyder) the Johns Hopkins Fogarty African Bioethics Training Program since its inception in 2000. Dr. Kass is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine (now National Academy of Medicine) and an elected Fellow of the Hastings Center.

Jeremy Sugarman, MD, MPH, MA

He was the founding director of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and History of Medicine at Duke University where he was also a professor of medicine and philosophy. He was appointed as an Academic Icon at the University of Malaya and is a faculty affiliate of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.

Dr. Sugarman was the longstanding chair of the Ethics Working Group of the HIV Prevention Trials Network. He is currently a member of the Scientific and Research Advisory Board for the Canadian Blood Service and the Ethics and Public Policy Committees of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. He co-leads the Ethics and Regulatory Core of the NIH Health Care Systems Research Collaboratory and is co-chair of the Johns Hopkins’ Institutional Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee.

Dr. Sugarman has been elected as a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, Association of American Physicians, and the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine). He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American College of Physicians and the Hastings Center. He also received a Doctor of Science, honoris causa, from New York Medical College.

Gail Geller, ScD, MHS

In addition to her work in genetics, Dr. Geller’s other substantive areas of scholarship include the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), the role of palliative care in chronic diseases, and the medical socialization process. 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. For 15 years, she co-directed the required Integrative Medicine course for Hopkins medical students, and the Healer’s Art elective. Several of the grants onwhich she has served as PI, Co-PI or Co-I have focused oncultivating respect, trust, empathy, wonder, and tolerance forambiguity among current and future health professionals. The unifying themes that animate her work are communication and decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, and the intrapersonal, interpersonal and social/cultural forces that influence moral development, attitudes and behavior.

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, she oversees the Hecht-Levi Fellowship Program in Bioethicsand the Masters in Bioethics . Dr. Geller has occupied several educational leadership positions in the SOM. She was involved in the revision to the undergraduate medical curriculum that took place in 2009. Currently, she co-directs the “culture of medicine” core theme which includes horizontal strands of particular relevance to ethics, professionalism and social justice. In addition, she directs the Scholarly Concentrationcalled the HEART (Humanism, Ethics, and the ‘Art’ ofMedicine), teaches in the “Medical Humanities & Social Medicine” elective, serves on the Advisory Board for the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine, and directs the Program in Arts, Humanities & Health. She is a member of the School of Medicine’s Admissions Committee.

Dr. Geller has 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.

Travis N. Rieder, PhD

Travis’ work tends to fall into one of two, quite distinct research programs. The first concerns ethics and policy questions about sustainability and planetary limits. Much of this research has been on issues in climate change ethics and procreative ethics with a particular focus on the intersection of the two – that is, on the question of responsible procreation in the era of climate change. His publications have appeared in several journals on this topic, as well as in a short book with Springer, entitled Toward a Small Family Ethic (2016). He also works on food ethics related to climate change and sustainability, and is currently a member of the Global Food Ethics and Policy team, focusing on ethical issues concerning high-emissions food, in particular animal-sourced foods.

The second, and much newer, research program concerns ethical and policy issues surrounding America’s opioid epidemic. In this area, Travis has published an essay in Health Affairs concerning physician responsibility for safely weaning patients off prescription opioids, and co-authored a National Academy of Medicine Perspective Paper on Physician Responsibility in combating the opioid crisis.

In addition to his more scholarly writing, Travis is firmly committed to doing bioethics with the public, and to that end writes and interviews regularly for the popular media; his work has appeared in very many high-impact publications, including The Guardian, Washington Post, NPR’s All Things Considered, New Republic, and IFLScience. He writes regularly for The Conversationand blogs occasionally at The Huffington Post and the Berman Institute Bioethics Bulletin.

Ruth R. Faden, PhD, MPH

Ruth R. Faden, PhD, MPH, is the founder of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. She was the Berman Institute’s Director from 1995 until 2016, and the inaugural Andreas C. Dracopoulos Director (2014-2016). Dr. Faden was, and is currently, the inaugural Philip Franklin Wagley Professor of Biomedical Ethics. In the twenty years in which Dr. Faden led the Berman Institute, she transformed what was an informal interest group of faculty across Johns Hopkins into a one of the world’s premier bioethics programs with over 35 faculty, 30 staff and over 100 alumni. Under her direction, the Berman Institute became a universitywide unit of Johns Hopkins with its own building, reporting to the Provost. Dr. Faden also secured a significant endowment for the Berman Institute, including six endowed professorships and an endowed directorship.

Dr. Faden is a leading scholar in the field of bioethics. She is the author and editor of numerous books and many articles on biomedical ethics and public policy, including most significantly Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy (with Madison Powers), A History and Theory of Informed Consent (with Tom L. Beauchamp), Structural Injustice: Power, Advantage, and Human Rights (with Madison Powers; forthcoming, Oxford University Press).

Dr. Faden’s current research focuses on structural justice theory, and on national and global challenges in food and agriculture, learning health care systems, health systems design and priority setting, and access to the benefits of global investments in biomedical research. Dr. Faden also works on ethical challenges in biomedical science, with a particular focus on women’s health and the rights and interests of pregnant women.

Dr. Faden is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and a Fellow of the Hastings Center and the American Psychological Association. She has served on numerous national advisory committees and commissions, including President William Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, which she chaired. Dr. Faden colaunched the Global Food Ethics and Policy Program, sponsor of the 7 by 5 Agenda for Ethics and Global Food Security. She is also a cofounder of the Hinxton Group, a global community committed to advancing ethical and policy challenges in stem cell science, and the Second Wave initiative, an effort to ensure that the health interests of pregnant women are fairly represented in biomedical research and drug and device policies.

In 2011, Dr. Faden was the recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) and Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIMR).

Jeffrey Kahn, PhD, MPH

Prof. Kahn has served on numerous state and federal advisory panels. He was most recently chair of National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Health Sciences Policy, and previously chaired its committee on the Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research (2011); the committee on Ethics Principles and Guidelines for Health Standards for Long Duration and Exploration Spaceflights (2014); and a committee on the Ethical, Social, and Policy Considerations of Mitochondrial Replacement Techniques (2016). He also formerly served as a member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee.

In addition to committee leadership and membership, Prof. Kahn is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and an elected Fellow of The Hastings Center. He was also the founding president of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors, an office he held from 2006-2010.

Prof. Kahn is a co-principal investigator with Berman Institute faculty member Gail Geller, ScD, MHS, on GUIDE: Genomic Uses in Infectious Disease and Epidemics, an NIH-funded project to study the largely unexplored ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of genomics as applied to infectious disease.

Prof. Kahn’s publications include Contemporary Issues in Bioethics; Beyond Consent: Seeking Justice in Research; Ethics of Research With Human Subjects: Selected Policies and Resources; The Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics (editor); Digital Contact Tracing for Pandemic Response (editor); as well as more than 125 scholarly and research articles. He also speaks widely across the U.S. and around the world on a range of bioethics topics, in addition to frequent media outreach. From 1998-2002 he wrote the bi-weekly column Ethics Matters on CNN.com. In 2023, he served as executive producer of a bioethics podcast, playing god?

Prior to joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, Prof. Kahn was Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota.