Mildred Solomon is President and Chief Executive Officer of The Hastings Center.  She is also Clinical Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School, where she directs the school’s Fellowship in Medical Ethics, a program aimed at building the bioethics capacity of Harvard-affiliated hospitals.  In addition to Fellows from the United States, her program has trained bioethicists from Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Israel, Australia and Iceland.

Dr. Solomon is a bioethicist and social science researcher who conducts both normative and empirical research on a wide range of values questions and topics of moral uncertainty in health, health care and public health. The primary focus of her scholarship has been on the ethics of end-of-life care for both adults and children, organ transplantation and research ethics. She is also an accomplished ethics educator.  For example, she co-founded the Decisions Near the End of Life program, which was adopted by 230 hospitals across the United States and adapted for use in Germany and Switzerland.  She also championed equal attention to gravely ill children, and founded The Initiative for Pediatric Palliative Care, which has produced an award-winning series of professional education films, a comprehensive curriculum for clinicians who care for children near the end of life, and educational retreats that have served more than 2,000 pediatric subspecialists, pediatric critical care nurses and related health care professionals.

In terms of her policy work, Dr. Solomon was one of many leaders who worked to create the field of palliative care and in the 1990s. She co-chaired a task force of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that focused on making institutional changes to improve end-of-life care.  She also served as the principal investigator on a RWJ-funded project that issued recommendations for integrating palliative care into managed care.  She was a member of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Organ Transplantation, which advises the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services on national organ donation and transplantation policies.  She has served on National Academy of Sciences committees and been a consultant to the Institute of Medicine, the Open Society Institute, and many other organizations.

Before taking the helm of The Hastings Center, Dr. Solomon was Senior Director of Implementation Science at the Association of American Medical Colleges, a membership association of all accredited medical schools in the United States and Canada, 450 teaching hospitals, and 90 medical and scientific specialty societies.  At the AAMC, she was responsible for helping academic medical centers develop their capacities in comparative effectiveness research, patient outcomes research, and implementation science.

Solomon earned her doctorate in educational research methods and adult learning at Harvard University and her B.A. from Smith College.