D. Micah Hester is Chair of the Department of Medical Humanities and Bioethics and Professor of Medical Humanities and Pediatrics at UAMS, as well as clinical ethicist at Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH).
Dr. Hester has been a leader in education for healthcare professionals, having served for over 20 years as director of the ethics curriculum for medical students, supporting the ethics portion of pharmacy student education, and developing ethics education for physician assistants, and serving as adjunct faculty in the College of Nursing, as well. Along with other department faculty, he provides clinical ethics consultations at both UAMS and ACH and helps with the research ethics consult service for the UAMS Translational Research Institute. He also serves on numerous committees both locally and nationally, and produces scholarly research in bioethical/philosophical areas.
Dr. Hester has published nine books and numerous journal articles. He has written extensively on the ethics of patient-professional relationships (Community As Healing [Rowman & Littlefield, 2001]) and end-of-life issues (End-of-life Care and Pragmatic Decision Making [Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010]). As an editor and chapter author, he has also concentrated on the education of ethics committee membership in two books: Guidance for Ethics Committees (Cambridge University Press 2012, second edition forthcoming) and Ethics By Committee (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
Trained in philosophy with a focus on American pragmatism, Dr. Hester has volumes on the work of William James (On James [Wadsworth, 2004], co-authored w/Robert Talisse), John Dewey, and William Earnest Hocking. Some of Dr. Hester’s publications can be found in leading bioethics journals, such as the American Journal of Bioethics, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and the Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. He also is regularly invited to give talks on bioethical topics throughout Arkansas, the Mid-South, nationally, and internationally.
Among other organization work, Dr. Hester has been on the Board of Directors of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities as well as the Association of Bioethics Program Directors. For over a decade he first developed then coordinated the Pediatric Ethics Consortium, which is a national professional initiative to promote pediatric ethics scholarship and education.
Email Dr. Hester at hesterdm@uams.edu
View Dr. Hester’s CV (PDF)