Debjani Mukherjee, PhD

Director, Donnelley Ethics Program
Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago

Assistant Director of Graduate Studies
Medical Humanities & Bioethics

Assistant Professor of
Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, and of
Medical Humanities & Bioethics

Interests

Traumatic brain injury, cross-cultural ethics, disability ethics

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Biography

Debjani Mukherjee is the Director of the Donnelley Ethics Program at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) and an Assistant Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Dr. Mukherjee is a licensed clinical psychologist and her scholarship and practice are informed by over 18 years of clinical experience, working in 8 hospital settings (in Buffalo; Boston; Urbana; Chicago; Paris, France; and Kolkata, India). At RIC, she is a clinical ethics consultant and the chair of the Hospital Ethics Committee. At NU, she is the assistant director of graduate studies for the Master of Arts (MA) in Medical Humanities and Bioethics (MH&B).

Debjani received her Bachelor's degree from Cornell University, and her Master's and Doctorate in Clinical/Community Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her thesis was entitled "Multiple perspectives, one decision: an ethnographic study of life support withdrawal after severe brain injury." Debjani completed two years of postdoctoral fellowship training at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago, and was an ethics fellow at Oak Forest Hospital of Cook County. After her fellowship, she was invited to spend a year in Paris, to help start the first center for Clinical Ethics in France, the Centre D'ethique Clinique at Cochin teaching hospital. 

Debjani’s research interests are in psychosocial adjustment to Traumatic Brain Injury, the cultural contexts of medical decisions, and ethical dilemmas posed by neurological impairments. She joined RIC and NU in 2004. In the summer of that year, she participated in "Disability Studies and the Legacies of Eugenics," a summer institute at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. In 2006-07, she received a Fulbright Scholar Faculty Research Award to examine long-term adjustment to Traumatic Brain Injury in Kolkata, India. At Northwestern, Debjani designed and teaches an undergraduate course on disability and global health, teaches and advises MA students in MH&B, and teaches medical students who are on their physical medicine and rehabilitation rotation. She also directed the disability ethics scholars program at RIC from 2007-2010. Debjani has lectured and published on topics ranging from negotiating hyphenated identities to ethical considerations in international traumatic brain injury research.

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Contact Info

312-238-1885
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dmukherjee@ric.org
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Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago
345 East Superior Street, Room 164
Chicago, IL 60611