Michael A. Grodin, MD
Professor
Boston University School of Public Health
Biography
Michael Alan Grodin, M.D., is Director of the Bioethics and Human Rights Program and Professor of Health Law, Bioethics, Human Rights, Socio-Medical Sciences and Community Medicine and Psychiatry at the Boston University Schools of Public Health and Medicine, where he has received 18 teaching awards including the Norman A. Scotch Award for Excellence in Teaching. In addition, Dr. Grodin is a Professor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences. He completed his B.S. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his M.D. degree at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, his postdoctoral and fellowship training at UCLA and Harvard, and he has been on the faculty of Boston University for the past 26 years.
Dr. Grodin is the Medical Ethicist at Boston Medical Center and for thirteen years served as the Human Studies Chairman for the Department of Health and Hospitals of the City of Boston. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, served on the board of directors of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research, the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for the Philosophy and History of Science. He was a member of the National Committee on Bioethics of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Committee on Ethics of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Professor Grodin serves on the Ethics Committee of the Massachusetts Center for Organ Transplantation, is a consultant to the National Human Subjects Protection Review Panel of the National Institutes of Health AIDS Program Advisory Committee, and is a consultant on Ethics and Research with Human Subjects for the International Organizations of Medical Sciences and the World Health Organization. He is a member of the Ethics Review Board of Physicians for Human Rights. Dr. Grodin is the Co-Founder of Global Lawyers and Physicians: Working Together for Human Rights, Co-Director of the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights: Caring for Survivors of Torture and he has received a special citation from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in recognition of his “profound contributions — through original and creative research — to the cause of Holocaust education and remembrance.” The Refugee Center, which he Co-Directs, received the 2002 Outstanding Achievement Award from the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project for “sensitivity and dedication in caring for the health and human rights of refugees and survivors of torture.” He is a Member of the Global Implementation Project of the Istanbul Protocol Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and an Advisor to UNESCO. Dr. Grodin was the 2000 Julius Silberger Scholar and is an elected member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the American Psychoanalytic Association. He has received 2 national Humanism in Medicine Awards for “integrity, clinical excellence and compassion” and “compassion, empathy, respect and cultural sensitivity in the delivery of care to patients and their families.”
Dr. Grodin has delivered several hundred national and international addresses, written more than 150 scholarly papers, and edited or co-edited 5 books: The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation and Children as Research Subjects: Science, Ethics and Law of the Bioethics Series of Oxford University Press, a book in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science Series of Kluwer Academic Press entitled Meta-Medical Ethics: The Philosophical Foundations of Bioethics, and two books published by Routledge one Health and Human Rights: A Reader selected as 2nd of the top 10 humanitarian books of 1999 and another entitled Perspectives on Health and Human Rights. Professor Grodin is presently writing a paper on Ethics and Psychoanalysis and working on a new book entitled Mad, Bad or Evil: Physician Involvement in Human Rights Abuses From Nazi Germany to the Former Yugoslavia. Dr. Grodin's primary areas of interest include: the relationship of health and human rights, bioethics and the philosophy of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.