The Center Welcomes...

The Medical Humanities Report would like to welcome Gerald S. Schatz, JD, and Dr. Margaret Holmes-Rovner, two new faculty who have joined the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences this spring. We look forward to the energy they will contribute to CEHLS through their research, teaching, and community outreach.

Gerald S. Schatz, JD has been appointed Assistant Professor in the College of Human Medicine and Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences. He is a lawyer, ethicist, and policy analyst, with a background in biomedical ethics, science policy, and domestic and international public law and includes experience at the U.S. House of Representatives, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the Georgetown Center for Clinical Bioethics, where he has been a Visiting Scholar.

Jerry has served on ethics review committees of the National Institutes of Health, and he developed and taught the Biomedical Ethics Law course at the Graduate School of the Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences, at the National Institutes of Health. His teaching and research interests are in the interrelationships of law and biomedical ethics and in protection of human subjects of biomedical and behavioral research. His recent work includes “International Law and Biomedical Ethics,” in Giovanni Russo’s new Encyclopedia of Bioethics, and “Are the Rationale and Regulatory System for Protecting Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research Obsolete and Unworkable, or Ethically Important but Inconvenient and Inadequately Enforced?”, in the Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy.

Margaret Holmes-Rovner is Professor of Health Services Research. Her research focuses on improving the quality of health care in the US, and patient-provider communication and shared decision-making. She teaches health policy, and ethics in the pre-clinical and post-graduate programs of the College of Human Medicine. Margaret received her PhD in curriculum and sociology at the University of Wisconsin in 1980, and joined the faculty of Michigan State University in the Office of Medical Education Research and Development in medical decision making the same year. She joined the Department of Medicine in 1986, and was Chief of the Division of Health Services Research from 1995-2005. She joined the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences in February, 2005, and is finalizing a joint appointment in the College of Nursing. She has served in leadership positions in academic governance, including Chairing the University Committee on Faculty Tenure, and the Women’s Advisory Committee to the Provost. She received the College of Human Medicine Outstanding Faculty Award in 2002 and the Department of Medicine, Outstanding Researcher in 2003.

Margaret has served in a national leadership capacity in the field of medical decision-making and technology assessment. She was the first woman elected to be President of the Society for Medical Decision Making, and served in many other roles in the Society, receiving the Eugene Saenger Award for Distinguished Service in 1999. She has served on many journal editorial boards, policy commissions and grant review panels for the CDC, NIH and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, serving as Chair of the Health Care Technology and Decision Sciences Study Section of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality from 1999-2003.

At an international level, Margaret is a founding member of the Shared Decision Making Forum-2000, funded by the Nuffield Trust to increase collaboration between North America and the United Kingdom (UK) in development, evaluation and implementation of shared decision-making. Her research focuses on descriptive and prescriptive studies of patient and physician decision-making. She has developed decision support tools, and decision aid evaluation measures, and presently serves as chair of the Health Literacy Expert Panel of the International Consensus on Standards for Developing and Evaluating Patient Decision Aids. Her other on-going scholarship is in the areas of health literacy, chronic disease management, and use of the electronic medical record (EMR) to facilitate patient participation in decision-making.