Holly Tabor, PhD, is the Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. She is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, and by Courtesy of Pediatrics and Epidemiology and Population Health. She is also Co-Chair of the Ethics Committees at Stanford Hospital and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. She is a globally recognized expert on the ethical issues surrounding health care and research for patients with disabilities, especially intellectual and developmental disability, and on the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) in genetics. Her research has shed light on the benefits and risks of participating in genomic research, particularly of rare and undiagnosed diseases. She is Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Bioethical Empirical Research.
David Magnus, PhD, is Thomas A. Raffin Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Ethics, and Professor of Pediatrics, Medicine, and by Courtesy of Bioengineering and Associate Dean of Research at Stanford University. He is a member of the Stanford Hospital and Clinics Ethics Committee, is past President of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors, and is the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Bioethics. He is currently the Vice-Chair of the IRB for the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative (“All of Us”).
Mildred Cho, PhD, Associate Director of Research at the Center is also Professor of Pediatrics. Her major areas of interest are the ethical and social issues raised by new technologies such as genetic testing, gene therapy, and artificial intelligence. She also studies how biomedical researchers can be encouraged to integrate ethical issues into their work.
Alyssa Burgart, MD, MA is Associate Director of Pediatrics at the Center and is also a Pediatric Anesthesiologist and Bioethicist. She earned her bachelors degree in Bioethics from the University of Judaism and her Masters in Bioethics and Health Policy from Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics at Loyola University Chicago. She co-chairs the Ethics Committee at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. Her areas of interest include pediatric bioethics, research on the practice of medicine, end-of-life conversations, and ethics in organ transplantation.
Kate Luenprakansit, MD is Associate Director of Clinical Ethics and is also a Surgical Co-Management Hospitalist in the Division of Hospital Medicine and Clinical Ethics consultant. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles in Molecular, Cell, Developmental Biology with a minor in Public Policy and received her medical degree from Oregon Health and Science University. She was also a MacLean Clinical Medical Ethics Fellow at the University of Chicago. She is currently a member of Stanford's Ethics Committee and serves as an ethics consultant.
Danton Char, MD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesia, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a Pediatric Cardiac Anesthesiologist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. His research focuses on ethical issues arising in the care of critically ill neonates, infants and children, particularly children with congenital cardiac disease.
Meghan Halley, PhD, MPH, is a medical anthropologist with a background in public health and a passion for research that engages the voices of patients and families in improving population health and healthcare delivery. Meghan is a proud Midwesterner, who completed her B.A. in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her PhD and MPH from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her broad research interests include the psychosocial dimensions of health and illness, the well-being of children and families, and medical decision-making, particularly in the context of complex illness. At SCBE, Meghan’s research examines the ethical and economic implications of genome sequencing for diagnosis of children with rare diseases and their families. Her work examines the ethical implications of varying approaches to economic evaluation and their relation to reimbursement and equitable access to new genomic technologies. She is also interested in the development of new tools for measurement of the costs and benefits of new genomic technologies that reflect patient values.
Bryant Lin, MD, is Director of Medical Humanities and Arts at Stanford University. He came to Stanford to serve as a Research Fellow in Cardiac Electrophysiology and Biodesign Fellow where he learned to identify unmet human-centered needs. Since completing his post-graduate training, he stayed at Stanford as clinical faculty in Primary Care and Population Health in the Department of Medicine where he has invented and researched new medical technologies addressing unmet human-centered needs and started the Consultative Medicine Clinic evaluating patients with medical mysteries. He serves as the Training Director for the Joe and Linda Chlapaty DECIDE Center which has created a novel shared decision-making tool for atrial fibrillation anti-coagulation and is an investigator in several active clinical trials. Three years ago, he co-founded and currently co-directs, with Dr. Latha Palaniappan, the Center for Asian Health Research and Education (CARE) which aims to improve the health of Asians everywhere. Most recently, he has worked closely with the Medicine and the Muse leadership to help start the Stuck@Home concert series, the Stanford SoundWalk, and the COVID Remembrance project. Dr. Lin has an active interest in storytelling and film-making. He co-directs an undergraduate seminar, MED 53Q “Storytelling in Medicine”, with Dr. Lauren Edwards and is working with a group of students on a documentary on end-of-life care at a Japanese-American Senior Home in the Bay Area.
Nicole Martinez-Martin, PhD, JD, received her JD from Harvard law School. In 2015, she received her doctorate in Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago, which brought together training in medical anthropology and biological psychology. Her broader research interests concern the impact of new technologies on the treatment of vulnerable populations. Her dissertation research focused on the use neuroscience in criminal cases, addressing how neuroscience influences depictions of the brain and criminality. Nicole's work at SCBE continues her interest in how genetic technologies will impact health practices.
Daphne Martschenko, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. Dr. Martschenko’s work advocates for and facilitates research efforts that promote socially responsible communication of and community engagement with human genetic/genomic research. Dr. Martschenko has appeared in numerous podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, and work has been published in publicly accessible media outlets like Scientific American and The Conversation. Currently, Dr. Martschenko is writing a book with friend and colleague Sam Trejo, a quantitative social scientist interested in how social and biological factors jointly shape human development across the life-course. In it, they unpack various social, ethical, and policy issues related to the DNA revolution – focusing on emerging genomic research on human behavior and social outcomes.
Bertrand M. Patenaude, PhD teaches history, international relations, and human rights at Stanford, where he is a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH) and a Lecturer at the Center for Biomedical Ethics (SCBE). He is also a Hoover Institute Research Fellow. His first book, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford University Press, 2002), won the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize and was the basis of a PBS documentary film broadcast in 2011. His most recent book, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, published by HarperCollins in 2009, was serialized for radio by the BBC. His previous work, A Wealth of Ideas: Revelations from the Hoover Institution Archives(Stanford University Press, 2006), is a generously illustrated large-format book featuring rare documents, photographs, posters, and artifacts from the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford.
Patenaude is the editor of several books, including The Russian Revolution and Stalin and Stalinism. His documentary film credits include associate producer of the Emmy Award-winning PBS film Inside the USSR and of the FRONTLINE documentary A Journey to Russia, and story editor of Stalin's Ghost, an NBC News Special Report. He was educated at Boston College and the University of Vienna and received his PhD in History from Stanford in 1987. He taught for eight years (1992-2000) in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where his outstanding performance as a classroom instructor was recognized with the Schieffelin Award for Teaching Excellence for two consecutive years (1998, 1999). Patenaude has lectured throughout Europe for Stanford Travel/Study, Smithsonian Journeys, and Lindblad Expeditions.
Alissa Megan Rogol, MD, JD is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Division of General Psychiatry and the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University. She received her MD from Columbia VP&S before completing both psychiatry residency and child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at Stanford, where she served as chief resident and chief fellow. Her undergraduate degree is from Princeton University, where she majored in Public Policy and International Affairs and received a certificate in American Studies. She then attended The George Washington University Law School, where she graduated with honors. She worked as a public defender for juveniles and adults in Philadelphia’s criminal justice system prior to starting her career in medicine. She currently serves as a member of the Ethics Committees at Stanford Hospital and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Her professional and academic interests focus on areas where the law, psychiatry and ethics intersect.
Mariana Schmajuk, MD, HEC-C, is a psychiatrist with a focus on clinical ethics and consultation-liaison psychiatry. She received her medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine and completed her General Adult Psychiatry Residency at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, serving as Chief Resident. She subsequently completed a Consult-Liaison fellowship at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Columbia University Medical Center.
Dr. Schmajuk joined the Stanford University psychiatry department in 2017, where she is a primary member of the emergency medicine consultations team, working collaboratively with a nurse practitioner, social worker, and residents. She has expertise in treating psychiatric sequelae in the context of complex medical illness.
In addition to her clinical work, Dr. Schmajuk is a member of the Stanford bioethics committee and the ethics consultation service. She has a particular interest in brief psychotherapeutic interventions and enjoys exploring innovative ways to teach communication and clinical assessment skills.
Tyler Tate, MD, MA is a pediatrician, palliative care physician, and ethicist at Stanford University. His academic interests include suffering and flourishing, love and the emotions, language and metaphor theory, and religion and bioethics. He practices pediatric palliative care, and serves as a clinical ethicist, at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. In 2024 he was selected as a Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar and received the Hastings Center Cunniff-Dixon Early-Career Physician Award, an award given every two years to three outstanding young palliative care physicians.
