| Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and of Medical Humanities & Bioethics
Former Director of Donnelley Family Disability Ethics ProgramDisability Ethics, Women with Disabilities Kristi L. Kirschner, MD is a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the Feinberg School of Medicine, and also holds a secondary appointment at the Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program. She is an attending physician at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), specializing in the care of patients with neurological disabilities. She is director of the Donnelley Family Disability Ethics Program and Medical Director of the RIC Women with Disabilities Program. Since 1995 Dr. Kirschner has held the Coleman Foundation Chair in Rehabilitation Medicine, awarded by RIC to support her work in disability ethics and women's health care. Dr. Kirschner's interest in disability ethics grew out of her clinical experiences with the disabled population. During medical school at the University of Chicago, she learned about clinical ethics—particularly regarding issues at the endings and beginnings of life--from some of the leaders in the field. But her medical school ethics classes did not seem to address the issues she faced almost daily in caring for people with complex, often life- (and identity-) altering disabilities. In 1994, she returned to the University of Chicago for fellowship training at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and in 1995 created the disability ethics program at RIC. The program was formalized as the Center for the Study of Disability Ethics in 1999, and renamed the Donnelley Family Disability Ethics Program in 2004. The program has had an intensive professional development component (the Disability Ethics Scholars Program) for RIC staff since 1997. To date, 40 scholars have participated. In 2002, the program and the University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Disability and Human Development launched a joint certificate in Disability Ethics, which is composed of a four-course sequence and co-taught by faculty from both institutions. Dr. Kirschner teaches at all levels of the Northwestern medical curriculum, in graduate and continuing medical education programs, and in the Northwestern genetic counseling program. She is particularly interested in how concepts of disability and quality of life affect medical decision making. 312/238-4744
kkirschner@ric.org
Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Room 1136 | |
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