I’m a social welfare scholar and clinical ethicist whose work examines how social and institutional structures shape how ethical problems are understood in health care, with particular attention to autonomy, decisional capacity, and patient rights. I currently serve as a Bioethics Director for a large healthcare organization in Southern California and as Affiliate Faculty with the UCLA Center for Social Medicine and Humanities.

My recent work includes projects on public mental health services and mandated treatment, as well as broader questions about social ontology and its implications for resolving ethical issues in everyday clinical practice. Across these areas, I’m interested in how social systems, power relations, and underlying assumptions shape both the problems that come to be recognized as ethical and the range of responses that appear available or justified. I refer to this approach as social bioethics.

Alongside my scholarship, I work as a clinical ethicist with patients, families, and healthcare teams confronting difficult decisions in clinical care. This keeps my research grounded in the realities of healthcare institutions and informs my broader interest in how ideas about autonomy and justice take shape in practice. I also speak regularly to academic and clinical audiences about these issues, often focusing on the social and institutional conditions underlying individual ethical dilemmas.

I serve as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry and write The Footnotes, an upcoming newsletter exploring the assumptions, histories, and social forces beneath the surface of medicine.

I hold an MSW and PhD in Social Welfare from University of California, Los Angeles and completed a Fellowship of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College. I am certified as a Healthcare Ethics Consultant (HEC-C) by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.

Banner info: Hospital Ward by Edvard Munch