Lisa Schwartz

Lisa Schwartz is the Arnold L. Johnson Chair in Health Care Ethics, Professor in the department of Health Research Methods, Evidence & Impact (formerly Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics), and associate member of the Department of Philosophy McMaster University. Between 2012-2017, Prof Schwartz was the Director of the PhD in Health Policy, and co-Associate Director of the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis (CHEPA), at McMaster University. She completed her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, where she then held the position of Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Medicine in the Department of General Practice, Faculty of Medicine.

From 2008-2017 she was the Vice-Chair of the Standing Committee on Ethics at CIHR, and a member of the non-pharmaceutical expert review panel for CADTH. Currently she is a member of the Ethics Committee at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Canada.

Dr Schwartz’s research background is in ethics and human research, evaluation of ethics education in medicine, and advocacy in health care. She has been co-investigator on studies on privacy and access to patient data for research, bio-banking, and consent practices. Currently, Dr Schwartz is the senior Primary Investigator on a program of CIHR and R2HC funded studies examining the ethical challenges faced by humanitarian healthcare providers, on ethics and policy development in humanitarian healthcare agencies, and a related study on ethics and conflicts of role for military healthcare professionals working in humanitarian contexts.

Two active studies focus on Research Ethics during times of Ebola, and Palliative Care in complex humanitarian emergencies. Dr Schwartz and is a member of the Ethics Review Board of Médecins Sans Frontières since 2014. She has collaborated with the International Committee of the Red Cross project on Health Care in Danger, is a member of the World Health Organization’s Public Health Ethics Consultative Group and Co-Chaired the authorship of the Guidance for Managing Ethical Issues in Infectious Disease Outbreaks, and contributed to the authorship of Integrating palliative care and symptom relief into responses to humanitarian emergencies and crises: a WHO guide.

For more information: http://www.chepa.org/who-we-are/faculty/details/lisa-schwartz