Anna Maria Gramelspacher is an assistant professor of clinical medicine in the division of Academic Internal Medicine and a member of the Health Humanities faculty at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. Anna Maria’s clinic work is primarily focused on caring for patients and supervising medical students and residents at the University of Illinois Primary Care Plus and General Internal Medicine Clinics. In addition to her clinical commitments, she participates in teaching and curriculum development within the Department of Medical Education. Her work at DME encompasses teaching the M4 Narrative Medicine Elective, lecturing M1 students in Health Humanities and contributing to faculty development sessions.

Erica Laethem is a Regional Director of Ethics for OSF HealthCare. She carries out ethics consultations, contributes to policy development, provides ethics education, and collaborates with leaders to integrate ethics into everyday professional practice. Prior to coming to OSF HealthCare, Erica worked as a Director of Clinical Ethics for Presence Health and for Resurrection Health Care in Chicago. She has served as a healthcare ethicist in diverse urban, suburban, rural, inpatient, outpatient, home care and corporate settings. She has also worked as a special consultant to the federal government, an instructor for Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth, and a clinical research coordinator in cardiovascular medicine at the University of Michigan Health System. Erica has a licentiate degree in bioethics from the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome as well as a bachelor of arts from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and is working to finish her PhD in bioethics. She is a certified healthcare ethics consultant through the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. Erica serves as an adjunct assistant professor of nursing ethics in the graduate program at the OSF Saint Anthony College of Nursing and is assisting in the development of the new medical ethics curriculum for University of Illinois College of Medicine in Rockford, where she also teaches.

Dr. Gwyneth Milbrath is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois College of Nursing. She is the Director of the Midwest Nursing History Research Center (MNHRC) and an Assistant Director of the Global Health Leadership Office (GHLO) in the College of Nursing. Her past historical research investigates the role and significance of military nurses during World War I and II, how they were trained, and how they responded to disasters such as the 1918 flu pandemic, or the bombing during Pearl Harbor. As the Director of the MNHRC, she works to provide relevant programming through a nursing history book club and presentations by renowned nurse historians. Additionally, she is committed to expanding and protecting the historical collections within the MNHRC, engaging and elevating underrepresented narratives within nursing history. As an Assistant Director of GHLO, Dr. Milbrath has developed new study abroad opportunities for nursing students, and mentors other faculty to develop additional offerings for students. She also has a continuing area of research around community disaster preparedness in the West Indies. Dr. Milbrath teaches in the BSN and DNP program, focusing on topics including social determinants of health, global health, ethics, and research methods. Her clinical areas of expertise are public health, disaster nursing, rural health disparities, and emergency nursing. She continues to maintain a current practice as an emergency department nurse.

Alyson Patsavas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she also serves as the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies. Her scholarship is situated at the intersections of queer theory, feminist theory, and disability studies, and focuses on cultural discourses of pain, disability and crip epistemologies as well as representations of disability in film, television, and popular culture. Her work appears in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Different Bodies: Essays on Disability in Film and Television, The Feminist Wire, Somatechnics, and Disability Studies Quarterly. Patsavas is also a writer and producer on the forthcoming documentary film Code of the Freaks that examines crip culture’s response to Hollywood representations of disability.

Carrie Sandahl is scholar/artist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is head of the Program on Disability Art, Culture, and Humanities, which is devoted to research on and the creation of disability art. She is also the director Chicago’s Bodies of Work, an organization that supports city-wide disability arts festivals and that promotes disability arts and culture year-round. Her own research and creative activity focus on disability and gender identities in live performance, including theatre, dance, and performance art. Sandahl has published numerous research articles and an anthology she co-edited with Philip Auslander, entitled Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance (University of Michigan Press) garnered the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s award for Outstanding Book in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy in 2006. She is currently collaborating on a feature-length documentary film on Hollywood representations of disability entitled Code of the Freaks.

Elsa L. Vazquez Melendez is Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics and Assistant Dean of Diversity and Inclusion at University of Illinois College of Medicine. She helps mentor students of different backgrounds and has been recognized for her work with 2 Golden Apple Awards and other teaching awards. She also works as a Hospitalist for the teaching services of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Peoria, supervising residents and medical students. She led the Simulation Program for Internal Medicine Residency Program. She has presented her work at national and international conferences. She is actively involved in the curricular transformation program of the UIC College of Medicine, integrating and teaching the sub themes of lifestyle medicine, population health, health equity and health humanities in the new curriculum. Her interests include curriculum development, medical education, simulation, patient-centered care, cultural studies, health equity and population health, particularly in pediatric asthma. She enjoys reading classic literature, hiking, running, yoga, traveling and spending time with her family.

Ellen Amster is the Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at McMaster University, and Associate Professor in the Departments of Family Medicine and Religious Studies. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. A historian of North Africa and France, her research on science in the French-Islamic colonial encounter was first a book, Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 (University of Texas ) and now extends to a field and Arabic course for students in Morocco and CIHR-funded global health work in maternal and infant health. Her recent articles touch on political Islam, Islamic biopolitics, the history of public health, and Sufism; her current research includes Muslim midwifery, medical humanities, the material and visual cultures of religion, the body, and women’s history. She has created the History of Medicine and Medical Humanities Research Portal, a resource for all researchers with a library, archival, museum, and digital collections.

Gretchen Case is Associate Professor and Chair of the Program in Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Utah School of Medicine, where she teaches arts and humanities to students, residents, physicians, and other health care providers. Dr. Case is the playwright and performer of several published works related to medicine and oral history, including “Tic(k)” and “Apoptosis Is My Favorite Word.” She earned a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and received her bachelors and masters degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Case has taught performance studies, theatre, writing, and medical/health humanities at UNC-Chapel Hill, UC-Berkeley, Florida State University, Northwestern University, Duke University, and the University of Utah.

Jodi Halpern M.D., Ph.D (Philosophy) is Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities in the Joint Medical Program and the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. Her work brings together psychiatry, philosophy, affective forecasting and decision neuroscience to elucidate how people imagine and influence their own and each other’s future health possibilities. Her first book, From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice, was called a “seminal work” by the Journal of the American Medical Association. Her upcoming book Remaking the Self in the Wake of Illness focuses on how people with health losses in the prime of life experience value and identity shifts. Her scholarly articles focus on topics that include emotions and decision-making, social dominance and bullying, post-war social reconciliation and the ethics of innovative technologies.

Her work appears in publications such as the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Emotion Review, Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience, Gerontology and Global Public Health as well as in popular media. Her current scholarship focuses on how innovative technologies change how we adapt to health losses, how we view our futures and the trajectory of empathic curiosity across differences. Her new book project “Engineering Empathy” looks at the upcoming uses of technology in emotional relationships, including using AI/robotics in caregiving (AI psychotherapy, elder and childcare), the influence of virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) on empathy, and the influence of gaming on mental health. Halpern is also doing embedded research with scientists developing new technologies in neuroscience and gene editing. Halpern is invited to present this work internationally, including at the 2018, 2019 and 2020 meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Jonathan Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, and the Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his MD from the University of Missouri, MA in humanities/poetics and Psychiatric internship/residency from Stanford University, and PhD in American Culture from University of Michigan, A 2008 Guggenheim fellow, Professor Metzl has written extensively for medical, psychiatric, and popular publications. His books include The Protest Psychosis, Prozac on the Couch, and Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality. Jonathan’s specializations include: Psychiatry, Race and Health, History of Mental Health, Gender, and Politics. His current projects include: history of medical boundary violations, structural competency, RWJ men and masculinity project, guns and mental illness.

Rebecca Garden, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Public Health and Preventative Medicine at Upstate Medical University. She earned her doctorate in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. Before coming to Upstate in 2004, she was Associate Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Garden’s research draws on fiction, autobiography, film, and video, as well as critical approaches to disability, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, to examine socio-cultural and ethical issues related to illness, disability, deafness, and health care. Her current research explores refugee literature and cultural approaches to dementia and decision-making in healthcare. She has published in journals such as New Literary History, the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Disability Studies Quarterly, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, the AMA Journal of Medical Ethics, and the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and she is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Medical Humanities, Literature and Medicine, and the Journal of Clinical Ethics. She edited the March 2019 special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities called Critical Healing: Queer and Crip Interventions in Biomedicine and Public Health. She has chapters in The Health Humanities Reader, Teaching Health Humanities, Research Methods in Health Humanities, and forthcoming in the Encyclopedia for Health Humanities. She teaches public health, medical, nursing, and health professions students, has published on disability/deafness, structural and cultural issues in healthcare, and narrative, and is Executive Director of the Consortium for Culture and Medicine, an inter-institutional collaborative in Syracuse, NY. In 2016, Dr. Garden was Chair of the Executive Committee for the Medical Humanities and Health Studies Forum of the Modern Language Association, in addition to being a founding member. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Medical Humanities, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and Literature and Medicine. From 2005 to 2011, she led the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Affinity Group for the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.