Dr. Thomasine K. Kushner was a philosopher by training and a pioneer in the field of international bioethics. She founded and served as editor of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, a leading peer-reviewed journal designed to serve as an international forum for addressing the complex challenges of biology, medicine, and healthcare, and connecting the bioethics community worldwide.

Dr. Kushner received her PhD in Philosophy (specializing in Aesthetics) from the University of Florida with additional study completed at the University of Stirling, Scotland. She served as faculty member in the Philosophy Department at Florida International University in Miami. One of the first women in the field of bioethics in the early 1980s, she provided ethics consultation and bioethics course development at the University of Miami School of Medicine. With appointments in the Department of Psychiatry, Medicine and Behavioral Sciences, and the Health and Human Values program, she co-founded the clinical ethics committee for the hospital. In 1985, she joined University of California, Berkeley, as the Executive Officer for the Committee for Protection of Human Subjects and oversaw research ethics. She later served as Clinical Professor of Bioethics in the UCSF/Berkeley Joint Medical Program and as Senior Research Fellow in the Human Rights Center. For 15 years, she taught bioethics to medical students at Berkeley and supervised bioethics graduate work in the School of Public Health. She served as principal investigator on the first national grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Education to develop curricula in healthcare ethics for hospital ethics committees and was instrumental in the formation of ethics committees at several hospitals in Northern California. After retiring from Berkeley, she joined Sutter Health’s Program in Medicine and Human Values in San Francisco where she continued to mentor fellows and clinical ethicists shaping their professional development. She continued her work as founder and editor for the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics published by Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Kushner has contributed extensively to the bioethics literature authoring and editing numerous scholarly articles and books. Some highlights include the “What Do I Do Now?” column for the student British Medical Journal (BMJ Publishing Group), Birth to Death: Science and Bioethics (Cambridge University Press), Asking to Die: Inside the Dutch Debate about Euthanasia (Kluwer Academic Publishers), Ward Ethics: A Case Book for Doctors-in-Training (Cambridge University Press), Surviving Health Care: A Guide for Patients and Their Families (Cambridge University Press), and the most recent Cambridge Elements Series on Bioethics and Neuroethics (Cambridge University Press). She founded and organized several professional conferences including the International Bioethics Retreat, Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education, and the ICM Neuroethics Network.

Sincerely,
Ruchika

Ruchika Mishra, PhD
Director,
Program in Medicine and Human Values, Sutter Health