Meet Our Speakers
Michael A. Grodin, M.D.
Michael Alan Grodin, M.D., is a Professor of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health, where he has received 20 teaching awards including the Norman A. Scotch Award for Excellence in Teaching. Dr. Grodin is also Professor of Family Medicine and of Psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine. In addition, Dr. Grodin is Director of the Project on Medicine and the Holocaust at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies. He completed his B.S. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his M.D. degree at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, his postdoctoral and fellowship training at UCLA and Harvard, and he has been on the faculty of Boston University for the past 34 years.
Dr. Grodin is the Medical Ethicist at Boston Medical Center and, for thirteen years, served as the Human Studies Chairman of the Department of Health and Hospitals for the City of Boston. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, served on the board of directors of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research, the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for the Philosophy and History of Science. He was a member of the National Committee on Bioethics of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Committee on Ethics of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Professor Grodin served on the Ethics Committee of the Massachusetts Center for Organ Transplantation, was a consultant to the National Human Subjects Protection Review Panel of the National Institutes of Health AIDS Program Advisory Committee, and is a consultant on Ethics and Research with Human Subjects for the International Organizations of Medical Sciences and the World Health Organization. He is a member of the Ethics Review Board of Physicians for Human Rights.
Dr. Grodin is the Co-Founder of Global Lawyers and Physicians: Working Together for Human Rights; Co-Director of the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights: Caring for Survivors of Torture; and he has received a special citation from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in recognition of his “profound contributions - through original and creative research - to the cause of Holocaust education and remembrance.” The Refugee Center which he Co-Directs received the 2002 Outstanding Achievement Award from the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project for “sensitivity and dedication in caring for the health and human rights of refugees and survivors of torture.” He is a Member of the Global Implementation Project of the Istanbul Protocol Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and an Advisor to UNESCO.
Dr. Grodin was the 2000 Julius Silberger Scholar and is an elected member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the American Psychoanalytic Association. Four times named one of America’s Top Physicians, he has received 4 national Humanism in Medicine and Humanitarian Awards for “integrity, clinical excellence and compassion,” “outstanding humanism in medicine and integrity as a faculty member” and “compassion, empathy, respect and cultural sensitivity in the delivery of care to patients and their families.”
Dr. Grodin has delivered over 400 invited national and international addresses, written more than 200 scholarly papers, and edited or co-edited 6 books: The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation and Children as Research Subjects: Science, Ethics and Law of the Bioethics Series of Oxford University Press; a book in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science Series of Kluwer Academic Press entitled Meta-Medical Ethics: The Philosophical Foundations of Bioethics; and three books published by Routledge: Health and Human Rights: A Reader, selected as 2nd of the top 10 humanitarian books of 1999, Perspectives on Health and Human Rights, and Health and Human Rights in a Changing World (in press). Professor Grodin is presently working on a new book, The Role of Jewish Physicians in the Ghettos During the Holocaust.
Dr. Grodin's primary areas of interest include: the relationship of health and human rights, medicine and the holocaust, and bioethics.
Ari Ciment, M.D.
Ari Ciment graduated Summa Cum Laude Yeshiva College before graduating with AOA honors from Rush Medical School in Chicago. After completing his internal medicine residency at the Robert Wood Johnson/ Princeton Program in New Jersey, he then completed a fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical care at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York where he was awarded the "fellow of the year". He currently works at Mt. Sinai Miami Beach in Pulmonary and Critical Care and actively teaches as a clinical professor for MSMC medicine residents, the FIU medical school and the Nova Southeasstern DO School. He has authored several chapters in the most up to date Critical care Emergency medicine textbook on asthma, COPD and hyperglycemic management and has given over 100 lectures and grand rounds on topics including lung cancer, interstitial lung disease, respiratory distress syndrome, sepsis and pulmonary embolism. He has also been an adjunct professor in Jewish Medical Ethics at Touro College and has authored several articles and given lectures on a variety of topics including confidentiality, disclosure of illness, abortion, and end of life issues in halacha.
