Concentration: Medical Humanities and Ethics

Project Mentor: Jay Baruch, MD

Graduation Year: MD 2011

Concentration Title:
Developing bioethics standards in journalism

Concentration Description:
The major focus of my bioethics concentration has been an activist exploration concerning improving standards in bioethics journalism. In 6/2008 I met with Steven Joffe, MD, bioethicist for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute about ethical standards for journalists. Based on this discussion, I drafted a journalism bioethics resolution for the 2008 AMA interim national meeting. Prior to the meeting, I collaborated with Brown AMA and the RI Medical Society to revise my language. I presented and defended resolution at I-08 meeting in Orlando. The resolution referred to AMA-Medical Student Section (MSS) Committee on Bioethics for further study. In 2009, I advised research of the AMA-MSS Committee on Bioethics in shaping a report presented at the 2010 AMA-MSS annual meeting in Chicago. The subsequent report and recommendations for the AMA to “encourage responsible biomedical and bioethics journalism and to support the efforts of the Association of Health Care Journalists and other organizations to promote responsible bioethics journalism" adopted unanimously by MSS in 6/2010. The next step is to advocate for this policy at the AMA House of Delegates level (through my position as national student Delegate responsible for policy) over the course of the year to become AMA policy. I also presented the poster “Improving bioethics and biomedical journalism” at the January 2009 BrownMed Summer Experience poster fair.