Douglas White will lead Pitt’s new Institute for Bioethics

Douglas B. White, vice chair and professor of critical care medicine in the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, has been named as the inaugural director of Pitt’s newly formed Institute for Bioethics.

The institute, which has been in development since 2024, will serve all six schools of the health sciences and replace the former Center for Bioethics and Health Law. It will focus on advancing scholarship and education related to ethical dilemmas that arise in health sciences fields and equipping health professionals with the advanced communication skills needed to deliver humanistic patient care.

White has also been appointed as associate dean of bioethics and humanism in medicine in the School of Medicine. In this role, he will likewise help ensure 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.

White holds the Chair for Ethics in Critical Care Medicine and serves as founding director of Pitt 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. White 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.

An expert on end-of-life decision making for patients with acute life-threatening illnesses, White’s research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health and private foundations since 2005. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed research articles and is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians, American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Hastings Center for Bioethics, which conducts interdisciplinary original research on ethical issues in health, science and technology. White has received numerous awards for his scholarship, including the Grenvik Family Award for Ethics from the Society of Critical Care Medicine.

In an Oct. 7 announcement, Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for the health sciences and John and Gertrude Petersen Dean of the School of Medicine, thanked Lisa S. Parker, the Dickie, McCamey and Chilcote Professor of Bioethics and professor of human genetics in the School of Public Health, for her work directing the Center for Bioethics and Health Law since 2016. Parker will bring her expertise to a new role as director of the institute’s Center for Research Ethics.