Douglas B. White, vice chair and professor of critical care medicine in the School of Medicine, has been appointed the inaugural director of the newly formed Institute for Bioethics. The institute, which has been under development since 2024, will serve all six Pitt Health Sciences schools and replace the former Center for Bioethics & Health Law, which is sunsetting.
It will focus on advancing scholarship and education related to the myriad ethical dilemmas that arise in the health sciences and equipping health professionals with the advanced communication skills needed to deliver humanistic patient care, according to an announcement from Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for health sciences.
White also has been appointed associate dean of bioethics and humanism in medicine in the School of Medicine. In this role, he will likewise help ensure that Pitt’s medical education and graduate research training programs prepare students to emerge as physicians and scientists equipped with the highest order of ethical knowledge and humanistic communication skills.
Lisa S. Parker, professor of bioethics and of human genetics in the School of Public Health, has served as director of the Center for Bioethics & Health Law since 2016. She will now fill a new role as director of the institute’s Center for Research Ethics.
White holds the chair for ethics in critical care medicine and serves as founding director of the School of Medicine’s Program on Ethics and Decision Making in Critical Illness — the first program nationwide dedicated to the study of ethical issues that arise in the care of critically ill patients. He received his medical degree and completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at University of California, San Francisco. While there, he also completed a master’s degree in epidemiology and biostatistics, a fellowship in bioethics, and served as an assistant professor of medicine before joining the University of Pittsburgh in 2009.