The Players: who we are

Dr. Piroska Kopar, MD joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis as an assistant professor in acute and critical care surgery and director of CHESS in 2018. She earned her undergraduate degree in the Great Books Program of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland; received her MD as a Woodruff Fellow from Emory University School of Medicine; and earned her executive MBA from Washington University’s Olin Business School. She trained in general surgery and trauma, critical care, and acute care surgery at Dartmouth and Yale respectively. She was first an academic, then a research fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Division of Medical Ethics, focusing on developing ethics education for surgery residents. This work she continued as a Surgical Education Research Fellow of the Association for Surgical Education.

Dr. Kopar directs CHESS’ Surgical Ethics Fellowship; is the Lead for the Medical School’s Gateway Curriculum’s ethics content; and serves on the Ethics committee at Barnes Jewish Hospital. Nationally, she is active in the American College of Surgeons’ ethics education initiatives and co-edits its Ethics in Surgery online community. Dr. Kopar is the president of the Consortium for Surgical Ethics, a national non-profit organization dedicated to the academic integrity of ethics research and education in surgery. She is a frequent presenter to both professional and community audiences and remains active in surgical ethics education research.

Recent Publications

• A Gap in Mission: The Disparate Mission of Medical School and Teaching Hospitals, Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development
• Do we know what we are talking about? Measuring resident and faculty surgical ethics competency, Global Surgical Education-Journal of the Association for Surgical Education
• Surgical Ethics Training: Educational and Professional Opportunities, Annals of Surgery
• The Surgeon as a Professional: Changes and Challenges over Time, Annals of Surgery
• Addressing futility: a practical approach, Critical Care Explorations
• The Panic of the Pandemic: Who Lives? Who Dies?, Difficult Decisions in Surgical Ethics
• Goals of Care with Palliative Surgery, Difficult Decisions in Surgery
• To reimagine the surgeon archetype, we need an arche-system: In response to Bakke et al’s “Surgical archetype”, Surgery
• When Doctors Disagree: A Case-Based Discussion of Pro-Active Ethics, Journal of Clinical Ethics
• Critical Ethics: How to Balance Patient Autonomy With Fairness When Patients Refuse Coronavirus Disease 2019 Testing, Critical Care Explorations 
• Oral and maxillofacial surgeons’ assessment of the role of Pernkopf’s atlas in surgical practice, Annals of Anatomy
• Ethics of Codes and Codes of Ethics: When is it Ethical to Provide Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation During the COVID-19 Pandemic?, Annals of Surgery
• The Triage Stalemate: Losing Fairness to Ethical Paralysis, Critical Care Medicine
• Cognitive Dissonance,  McSweeney’s 
• Ethics in the Time of Coronavirus: Recommendations in the COVID-19 Pandemic, Journal of the American College of Surgeons
• The Surgeon as Double Agent: Surgeons’ Perceptions on Conflicting Expectations of Patient Care and Stewardship of Resources, Journal of the American College of Surgeons

Douglas Brown, PhD has been an ethics educator and a qualitative researcher with Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital since 2007.  He has been in the Department of Surgery since 2011.  Before coming to St. Louis, he worked for a decade as a member of the executive leadership team for a community health center in a rural and impoverished region of East Tennessee Appalachia.

Dr. Brown entered the medical/surgical education sphere in the early 1980s through collaborations with faculty at the University of Tennessee School of Medicine and has had subsequent affiliations with the schools of medicine at the University of Michigan, the University of Miami, and Louisiana State University.  His research has focused on integrity, end-of-life care, medical aid in dying, reproductive health, community health, health inequities, and the use of patients in educating/training learners.  He and his wife reside in the Central West End neighborhood of St. Louis.

Recent Publications

• Personhood Begins at Birth: The Rational Foundation for Abortion Policy in a Secular State, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry
• Do we know what we are talking about? Measuring resident and faculty surgical ethics competency, Global Surgical Education-Journal of the Association for Surgical Education
• ‘Personhood’ abortion bans are rooted in religion, not science, Saint Louis Post-Dispatch
• Surgical Ethics Training: Education and Professional Opportunities, Annals of Surgery
• The Surgeon as Professional: Changes and Challenges Over Time, Annals of Surgery
• Ethical Issues in Urogynecology, Ostergard’s Textbook of Urogynecology
• Addressing futility: a practical approach, Critical Care Explorations
• The Panic of the Pandemic: Who Lives? Who Dies?, Difficult Decisions in Surgical Ethics
• Goals of Care with Palliative Surgery, Difficult Decisions in Surgical Ethics
• To reimagine the surgeon archetype, we need an arche-system: In response to Bakke et al’s “Surgical archetype”, Surgery
• When Doctors Disagree: A Case-Based Discussion of Proactive Ethics, Journal of Clinical Ethics
• Critical Ethics: How to Balance Patient Autonomy with Fairness When Patients Refuse COVID-19 Testing, Critical Care Explorations
• Oral and maxillofacial surgeons’ assessment of the role of Pernkopf’s anatomy atlas in surgical practice, Annals of Anatomy 
• Ethics of Codes and Codes of Ethics: When Is It Ethical to Provide Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation During the COVID-19 Pandemic?, Annals of Surgery
• The Triage Stalemate During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Losing Fairness to Ethical Paralysis, Critical Care Medicine
• Ethics in a Time of Coronavirus: Engaging in the Conversation: In Reply to Hai and Colleagues, Journal of the American College of Surgeons
• Ethics in a Time of Coronavirus: Recommendations in the COVID-19 Pandemic, Journal of the American College of Surgeons

Patricia Olynyk is an artist, writer, and educator. Her work investigates science and technology-related themes and the ways in which social systems and institutional structures shape our understanding of the world. She is the Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art at Washington University in St. Louis, Co-chair of Leonardo/ISAST’s LASER Talks program in New York, and Medicine + Media Arts Fellow at UCLA’s Art | Sci Center. Her work has been exhibited internationally and her writing has been published by Routledge Press, Intellect Press, Leonardo Journal, and Actar Press.

Olynyk is on the executive committee for Medical Humanities in Arts & Sciences, where she teaches the ways in which visual culture and representations of the body shape and have been shaped by Medicine. Olynyk is particularly interested in the ethical dimensions of body modification through elective surgery, whereby a subject seeks to propose a new form for the human body, and in some cases, for human consciousness.

Recent Publications

• The Art of Medicine: A New Medical Humanities Gateway Course, Teaching Artistic Research
• Creature Comforts and Ties that Bind, Public
• Synthesizing fields: Art, complexism, and the space beyond now, Technoetic Arts 
• Fantastic Voyage and Other Scales of Wonder, The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture
• Lost in Space with Frankenstein’s Shadow, Bio/Matter/Techno Synthetics: Design Futures for the More than Human

Kyler Squirrell is an undergraduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, pursuing a major in Chemistry with an emphasis in Biochemistry and a minor in Medical Humanities. Beyond academics, he volunteers in the Schoolroom at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and works as a phlebotomist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He is interested in continuing his education within the medical field during medical school, following his graduation in 2024.

Kyler has been working with the CHESS Surgical Ethics Fellowship as an intern since August 2021. During this time, he was led by Dr. Piroska Kopar and Dr. Douglas Brown through a two-semester bioethics course, and then progressed to helping research and edit publications within the CHESS Surgical Ethics Fellowship. After completing the course, Kyler led another group of undergraduate students through the course, and with their help published a paper for the Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development. The paper discusses the contrasting mission statements of medical schools and teaching hospitals and its possible effects on education quality. Kyler plans to continue his involvement with the CHESS Surgical Ethics Fellowship while finishing his degree and applying to medical school.

Recent Publications

• A Gap in Mission: The Disparate Missions of Medical Schools and Teaching Hospitals, Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development
• Addressing futility: a practical approach, Critical Care Explorations 

Recent Awards

• 2nd place in the Trachtenberg Bioethics Essay Contest from the Montefiore Einstein Center for Bioethics

Dr. Onochie Ike Okoye, MBBS, MSc, MD, FMCOph, HEC-C  is a professor in Ophthalmology at the College of Medicine, University of Nigeria (UNN) and a consultant ophthalmologist (Ocular Genetics/Low Vision Rehabilitation) at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), Ituku-Ozalla, Enugu, Nigeria. Before joining the CHESS Surgical Ethics Fellowship, he had completed a fellowship in clinical medical ethics at the Maclean Centre at the University of Chicago (2016) and a fellowship in ocular genetics at the Flaum Eye Institute, University of Rochester, NY, USA (2022). He currently serves on the Health Research Ethics Committee of the UNTH/UNN, and the Ethics Committee of the Ophthalmological Society of Nigeria (OSN). He is also a key member of the Eastern Nigeria Research Ethics Initiative, where he functions as faculty on the MSc Bioethics and MPH Bioethics blended degree programs of the University of Nigeria. His current research interests lie in the intersection of ophthalmic practice/education, ocular genetics and bioethics. He is passionate about developing a model for the provision of clinical ethics consultation services in Nigeria and developing appropriate resources and methods for the formal teaching of bioethics and professionalism to undergraduate students of the healthcare professions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Recent Publications

• Random Reflections on Medical Professionalism: Ethical Concerns for the Contemporary Ophthalmologist in Nigeria, Nigerian Journal of Ophthalmology

Dr. Li-Hsuan Hsiao, MD, MSc, FRCSC is an obstetrician and gynecologist at Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. He received his MD from the University of British Columbia and completed his obstetrics and gynecology residency at the University of Saskatchewan. He has presented surgical videos and simulation projects at the American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists and the Canadian Society for the Advancement of Gynecologic Excellence conferences. He completed his Master of Science in Bioethics at Harvard University in 2024. His research interest is in surgical ethics.  Thus far, he has focused on investigating the moral imperative incumbent upon healthcare institutions to support surgeons grappling with the repercussions of second victim syndrome. Moving forward, he envisions delving deeper into the ethical quandaries inherent in medical pedagogy, reproductive healthcare, and the provision of surgical services.

Recent Publications

• Surgeons’ Perceptions and Attitudes Towards the Moral Imperative of Institutionally Addressing Second Victim Syndrome in Surgery, Journal of American Congress of Surgeons