Nancy Berlinger, PhD, MDiv
Deputy Director
Associate for Religious Studies
Nancy Berlinger is Deputy Director and Research Associate at The Hastings Center. Her research interests focus on clinical ethics and include end of life care; ethics in health care chaplaincy; conscientious objection in health care; and patient safety and the resolution of medical harm. Her broader interests include bioethics issues in cancer care, narrative ethics, and medical humanities.
Currently, she directs a research project that will revise and expand the highly influential Hastings Center guidelines on end of life care. This project is funded by the Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Foundation and the Albert Sussman Charitable Remainder Annuity Trust. She also co-directs a research project, funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, which will examine how professional chaplains define “quality” within their own practice and in relation to institutional quality improvement efforts. As Deputy Director, she manages the Center’s organizational capacity-building initiative, Bioethics and the Public Interest, which has received major support from the Ford Foundation.
Berlinger is the author of After Harm: Medical Error and the Ethics of Forgiveness (Johns Hopkins, 2005), which will be released in paperback in 2007.
She is a frequent presenter at grand rounds and other ethics education programs for health care professionals. She serves on the ethics faculty of the American Society of Healthcare Risk Managers (ASHRM), the bioethics committees at Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, New York, and the editorial board of Medical Ethics Advisor. She volunteers on the Chaplaincy Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
She is a graduate of Smith College and holds the Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Glasgow and the M.Div. in Christian Ethics from Union Theological Seminary.