Dr. Arthur R. Derse

Arthur R. Derse, M.D., J.D., is Director of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, Julia and David Uihlein Chair in Medical Humanities, and Professor of Bioethics and Emergency Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Dr. Derse is a member and past chair of the Ethics Committee of the American College of Emergency Physicians. He is a member of the administrative board of the Council of Faculty and Academic Societies of the Association of American Medical Colleges and chair of its Advocacy Committee. He serves as emergency medicine advisor to the national Physicians Orders on Life Sustaining Treatment Task Force. He is a member of the Wisconsin State Disaster Medical Advisory Committee and served on its Ethics and Vaccine Distribution Subcommittees.

He serves as an advisor from the American Bar Association’s Commission on Law and Aging to the Uniform Law Commission’s Uniform Determination of Death Act Drafting Committee, and serves as an observer from the American College of Emergency Physicians to the Uniform Law Commission’s Uniform Health Care Decisions Act Drafting Committee.

Dr. Derse is past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and served as chair of the National Ethics Committee of the Veterans Health Administration for 10 years. He served on the boards of the American Society for Law, Medicine, and Ethics, and the Association of Bioethics Program Directors. He served as Senior Consultant for Academic Affairs at the American Medical Association’s Institute for Ethics, and as a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Law and Aging. He served as a member of the Ethics and Professionalism Committee of the Federation of State Medical Boards.

He is senior advisor to the Froedtert Hospital Ethics Committee (the adult university hospital of the Medical College of Wisconsin). He served as chair of the committee for 23 years and supervisor of ethics consultation. He served as an ethics consultant at the hospital for 33 years. He also served as co-chair of the ethics advisory committee and ethics consultant at the Milwaukee Veterans Administration Hospital for 16 years and has served as an ethics committee member and ethics consultation team member at Children's Wisconsin since 1993.

Dr. Derse’s educational activities include direction of the medical school's medical ethics, law and medical humanities curricular thread, and several graduate school courses encompassing law, ethics education and ethics consultation, as well co-direction of the medical school’s bioethics and medical humanities scholarly pathway. He also directs several of the medical school’s medical humanities elective courses.

His publication and research has focused on emergency medicine and ethics, confidentiality, informed consent, end-of-life decision-making, the doctor-patient relationship and allocation of health resources. He is co-author of the Code of Ethics of the American College of Emergency Physicians, and Practical Ethics for Students, Interns and Residents: A Short Reference Manual, 4th Edition. He serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Bioethics, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and the AMA Journal of Ethics.

Dr. Derse is a fellow of the Hastings Center and of the American College of Emergency Physicians. He is a recipient of the Gold Foundation’s Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award and received the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities’ Distinguished Service Award, and the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Distinguished Service Award, the school’s highest honor.

He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Medical School and the University of Wisconsin Law School, cum laude, and he completed his emergency medicine residency at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He is a member of the State Bar of Wisconsin.