Senior Faculty Scholars

Lainie Friedman Ross, MD, PhD, is the Carolyn and Matthew Bucksbaum Professor of Clinical Medical Ethics; Professor, Departments of Pediatrics, Medicine, Surgery and the College; Co-Director of the Institute for Translational Medicine, and Associate Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Clinically, Dr. Ross is a primary care pediatrician at The University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital and provides inpatient care of newborns in the Mother-Baby Unit.

Dr. Ross earned her undergraduate degree in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University, her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and her doctorate in philosophy from Yale University. She trained in Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Ross’ research portfolio concentrates on ethical and policy issues in pediatrics, organ transplantation, genetics, and human subjects protections. She has published four books and over 200 articles in the peer-reviewed literature. Her fifth book, The Living Donor as Patient was funded by a Robert Wood Johnson Award in Health Policy and will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021. She is currently writing a 6th book examining the ethical issues related to siblings in health care that is funded by the National Library of Medicine. She is a frequent lecturer both nationally and internationally and actively involved in teaching ethics to trainees and staff at the University of Chicago Medicine.

Dr. Ross has served on a wide range of professional organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Bioethics, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) Ethics Committee, the International Pediatric Transplantation Association Ethics Committee, the HHS Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP) and the NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC).

Dr. Ross was a 2014 recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a 2015 recipient of the American Academy of Pediatrics William G. Bartholome Award for Ethical Excellence.

As of January 2023, Dr. Ross is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics at The University of Rochester.

Dr. Kiran K. Turaga is a renowned surgical oncologist with a specific expertise in metastatic cancers. He grew up in India and completed his medical training from the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). He completed his surgical residency from Creighton University and his fellowship from The Moffitt Cancer Center. He also holds a Master’s in Public Health from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Dr. Turaga is interested in the patient centered management of patients with complex malignancies. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, he was the Sharon Wadina Endowed Professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Some of his initiatives have included patient navigation, trimodality prehabilitation for patients undergoing complex cytoreductive surgery and early use of supportive oncology in the management of patients. Along with the regional therapies team, he has successfully created one of the premier programs for cytoreductive surgery and regional therapies in the nation which attracts patients from across the country.

Dr. Turaga’s research has focused on patient outcomes with oligometastatic cancers and he has published over 110 journal articles. He has contributed scholarly works to foremost oncological textbooks about peritoneal surface malignancies and is currently the section editor for the Annals of Surgical Oncology for the regional therapies section. He is interested in disease prediction, modeling and delivery of optimal care for his patients.

He is also the fellowship director for the Complex General Surgical Oncology Fellowship program at the University of Chicago/Northshore program. He has been awarded the Department of Surgery Excellence in Teaching award in 2016-17.

As of 2023 Dr. Turaga joined the faculty at Yale School of Medicine

Daniel Johnson, MD, has focused his career on improving access to quality healthcare. In 2010 he created ECHO-Chicago, a telehealth program for community level capacity building using case-based interactive sessions to education primary care providers in the diagnose and management of common chronic complex health conditions. The program has educated thousands of adult and pediatric primary care providers across Chicago and Illinois and contributed to the creation of ECHO programs elsewhere in the US and other countries.

Dr. Johnson is a physician, scholar and educator. He completed his training in 1986 and is certified by the American Board of Pediatrics in Pediatrics and Pediatric Infectious Disease. At University of Chicago Medicine since 2007, he is Professor of Pediatrics in the Department of Pediatrics where he serves as Vice Chair for Clinical Services and Section Chief of Pediatric Infectious Diseases. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and abstracts.

Megan Applewhite, MD, MA, FACS, is a board-certified general surgeon who specializes in endocrine surgery. She is also the Associate Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. She completed her general surgery residency at the Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, MA, and her fellowship in endocrine surgery as well as clinical medical ethics at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Chicago, she was at Albany Medical College, where she was an Associate Professor of Surgery and the John A. Balint MD Chair for Ethics Education and Research.

Dr Applewhite’s clinical practice involves the surgical treatment of benign and malignant diseases of the thyroid, parathyroid and adrenal glands. She focuses her care on engaging in personalized and thoughtful discussions with patients about quality of life and patient reported outcomes for their particular diagnosis.

Her academic interests are in both the quality of care of patients with surgical endocrinopathies, as well as in clinical medical ethics, and the intersection between patient care and bioethics. Specifically, she has an interest in healthcare in the incarcerated patient population, research ethics and informed consent, and military medical ethics.  Since 2020, she has served as a Senior Bioethics Consultant to the Department of Defense Medical Ethics Center, which is charged with the development, evaluation and implementation of a systematic Department of Defense Medical Ethics Program across the entire Military Health System/DoD.

As a dedicated colleague and teacher, Dr. Applewhite enjoys the mentoring trainees and junior faculty. She recognizes the importance of team cohesiveness and support as critical to positive culture and flourishing at work.

Dr. Brian Callender is an adult hospitalist in the section of Hospital Medicine and an Associate Professor of Medicine. He attended the Pritzker School of Medicine and continued at the University of Chicago for his residency training in internal medicine. He is a graduate of the Medical Education Research Innovation Teaching and Scholarship (MERITS) fellowship and the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics fellowship.

An academic hospitalist, Dr. Callender is interested in how the health humanities can improve the patient experience, provider-patient relationships, and our understanding of the illness experience and the practice of medicine. These interests have led to the development of a number of courses that explore the phenomenology of illness and the visual culture of medicine including: The Body in Medicine and the Performing Arts; The Narratives and Aesthetics of Contagion: Knowledge Formation and the COVID-19 Pandemic; Graphic Medicine: Comics Creation as Knowledge Formation; Graphic Medicine: Concepts and Practice; The Art of Healing: Medical Aesthetics in Russia and the US; Death Panels: Exploring Dying and Death Through Comics; and [Re]Framing Graphic Medicine: Comics and the History of Medicine

His interest in the visual culture of medicine has resulted in the co-curation of several exhibitions at the University Library’s Special Collections Research Center: Imaging and Imagining: The Human Body in Anatomical Representation (2014); The Fetus In Utero: From Mystery to Social Media (2019); [Re]Framing Graphic Medicine: Comics and the History of Medicine (2022)

Dr. Callender is particularly interested in the field of graphic medicine, defined as the intersection of comics, health, and medicine. These interests include teaching graphic medicine courses, using comics in patient education and science communication, conducting workshops on comics-making for patients and providers, and researching the historical and contemporary uses of comics within healthcare. He is a co-editor of the Graphic Medicine Series at the Penn State University Press and was co-chair of the 2022 Graphic Medicine conference held at the University of Chicago.  

Dr. Press is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics, Executive Medical Director Specialty Value Based Care, and Medical Director of the Care Transitions Clinic at the University of Chicago. Dr. Press received her medical degree and master of public health in health management and policy degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She completed her internal medicine and pediatrics residency training and health services research fellowship training at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Press’ research is focused on developing, testing, and implementing patient and system level interventions to improve the quality and value of care for patients with chronic diseases across care transition settings. Her areas of focus include improving communication between patients and clinicians through interventions that are tailored to patients’ health literacy and technology literacy, ensuring interventions meet the needs of diverse patient populations, and optimizing systems to provide resources and interventions to the right patients at the right time. She currently serves as principal investigator for two Research Project grants (R01s) from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which are both focused on improving care for patients with COPD by utilizing patient and system centered and tailored interventions to reduce revisits to the emergency department and/or hospital after hospitalization for COPD exacerbations.

In addition to these federal grant awards, Dr. Press has an active research portfolio with the Bucksbaum Institute having received several pilot awards focusing on improving the patient and clinician communication and care for patients with low health literacy and e-health literacy, chronic diseases including chronic lung disease and sickle cell, particularly around optimizing technology-based approaches to education and self-management.

Dr. Anna Volerman is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at University of Chicago Medicine. She is a primary care physician for both children and adults as well as a health services researcher focused on improving organizational systems and reducing inequities. She received her Bachelors from Northwestern University and graduated summa cum laude from Boston University School of Medicine. She completed her Internal Medicine / Pediatrics residency training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Boston Children’s Hospital. At University of Chicago, she leads clinical, community, education, research, and advocacy initiatives focused on health, education, and workforce disparities.

Dr. Nita Karnik Lee is a Gynecologic Oncologist in the University of Chicago Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of women with gynecologic cancers. Her focus is on providing comprehensive and compassionate surgical, chemotherapy and survivorship care to women diagnosed with ovarian, uterine, cervical, vulvar or vaginal cancers throughout their cancer journey. She is skilled in open and minimally invasive surgery, including robotic surgery for gynecologic cancers and complex benign gynecologic conditions. Dr. Lee believes in a personalized approach to treatment that includes tailored surgery, chemotherapy, clinical trials and supportive care. Her dedication to her patients is one of the many reasons she has been named a Top Doctor in Gynecologic Oncology by Chicago Magazine.

Dr. Lee’s interests include patient centered research in cancer survivorship, supportive oncology and cancer disparities. Areas of interest include: promoting patient survivor advocacy; HPV and cervical cancer patient navigation and education; lifestyle change and weight management after cancer diagnosis; psychosocial and needs of gynecologic cancer survivors to promote quality of life. She also leads the University of Chicago Woman to Woman Program, a peer-to-peer mentoring program for gynecologic cancer survivors.

Dr. Lee serves as the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Assistant Director of Community Engagement. Through this role, she supports ongoing community collaborative education and research to reduce cancer disparities in the surrounding Chicago communities with a personal focus in gynecologic cancers. She is a passionate patient advocate and partners with organizations and survivors in their advocacy and education efforts. At the national level, Dr. Lee served as the Chair of the Patient Education Committee of the Foundation for Womens’ Cancer and a member of the American Society for Clinical Oncology Survivorship Committee.

2013 Pilot Grant Project: Predictors of satisfaction with surgical decision-making in elderly women undergoing gynecologic surgery

2012 Pilot Grant Project: Endometrial Cancer Survivorship in African-American Women

Dr. Rossi-Foulkes is an experienced general internist and pediatrician with expertise in transition care and medical education. She has extensive experience with student and resident curricular development and evaluation, inter-professional education and collaboration, practice management and quality improvement in primary care training. Since 2006, Dr. Rossi-Foulkes has been the Program Director of the University of Chicago Med-Peds Residency program. Her excellence in quality improvement was recognized in 2007 with the Department of Medicine Excellence Award in Clinical Care and Education. She was inducted into the UCM Academy of Distinguished Medical Educators in 2009. In 2017 Dr. Rossi-Foulkes was awarded the UCM inaugural Program Director of the Year award from the Graduate Medical Education Committee. She was an advisor to the Illinois Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics in developing their training courses for the Illinois Healthcare Transition Project and has also been on the Illinois Department of Public Health Immunization Advisory Committee since 2005. Nationally, Dr. Rossi-Foulkes is on the Transition Care Committee for the Med-Peds Program Director’s Association, and she was elected to serve four years as the national Secretary-Treasurer for that organization. Dr. Rossi-Foulkes has conducted workshops and been invited to lecture on medical education, quality improvement, and transition care for local, regional and national conferences.

As of November 2022, Dr. Rossi-Foulkes is Director of the Primary Care Track at Cedars-Sinai Health System in Los Angeles, CA.

Dr. James N. Woodruff is a professor of medicine and Dean of Students for the Pritzker School of Medicine.  In this role, he supports medical students in their professional development, specialty selection and residency application.  A graduate of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Woodruff completed his internal medicine residency and chief residency in the department of medicine at the University of Chicago.  His 8-year tenure as director of the internal medicine residency program and 6-year tenure as the Department of Medicine’s vice chair for education provide him with broad perspective on the medical training pathway.  Dr. Woodruff remains a core faculty member of the internal medicine residency with responsibility for managing 14 fellowship-training programs. He is a practicing general internist, caring for patients in both ambulatory and inpatient settings on the South Side of Chicago.  His areas of scholarship include medical professional development, complexity in medicine, adaptive behavior, practical wisdom, and diversity & inclusion.