Jay Baruch, MD is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where he also serves as the director of the Program in Clinical Arts and Humanities, co-director of the medical humanities and bioethics scholarly concentration, and director of the ethics curriculum.

His collection of short fiction, Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (Kent State University Press, 2007) was Honorable Mention in the short story category in ForeWord Magazine’s 2007 Book of the Year Awards. His short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous print and online literary journals.

He is a former faculty fellow at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University. The focus of his work involves developing a program in pragmatic medical humanities. This includes a central emphasis on creativity as a medical instrument and the role of the humanities as a means for community engagement on healthcare issues. His teaching and curriculum projects at Alpert Medical School are rooted in interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations, bringing medical students into conversations with law students at Roger Williams University Law School and art students at Rhode Island School of Design. He also teaches an undergraduate medical humanities seminar at Brown University.

He lectures nationally on topics ranging from creative writing, the medical humanities, and medical ethics. More information on Jay Baruch can be found at www.jaybaruch.com

Jeffrey Borkan, MD, PhD joined the Department of Family Medicine at Alpert Medical School as professor (research) and chair in 2001.  He is a family physician researcher, educator, clinician, and writer whose career has bridged two fields (family medicine and medical anthropology), both in the US and abroad (Israel & Tonga).  Since medical school, he has been active in family medicine research and writing, as well as being a practicing family physician and resident/student educator.  For six years, he was the Coordinator of Israeli national practice based research network and served as the director of research in the Department of Family Medicine at Ben Gurion University for a decade. Concurrently, he managed the medical services of an isolated desert region in southern Israel, later joining a model teaching practice in the Galilee.

Dr. Borkan came to Brown after having been the vice chair of behavioral science at Tel Aviv University, coordinating a major humanistic curriculum reform there. He has continued this work as chair of the MD Curriculum Committee at Brown. Though most of his research utilizes qualitative and narrative methods, he is also active in mixed methods research. Most investigations have focused on low back pain, medical education, and common problems in primary care.  He is active in narrative medicine, both on a theoretical and practical level.  He is the editor of a book on medical story telling in primary care and has conducted several medical narrative investigations.  He has lectured extensively on narrative medicine in the US and abroad and previously taught a course at Brown on “Physicians as Writers, Physicians as Subjects.”

Sarah Ganz Blythe is director of education at the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum of Art, and was previously director of interpretation and research at The Museum of Modern Art. She teaches and writes on exhibition culture and interpretation practices. She received her PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and a BA in art history from Wellesley College.

John Caskey, MD, PhD, is a chief resident in the Combined Residency Training Program in Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Child Psychiatry at Brown University.  He completed his medical training at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.  There, he also completed his PhD in medical humanities, with particular focus on literature and narrative studies in health care and health care ethics.  His graduate training culminated in a doctoral dissertation entitled "Cultivating Moral Medicine: Ethical Criticism and the Relevance of Richard Selzer to Medical Ethics," in which he examined the unique and essential contributions of literature to a sufficient conception of ethics for medical education and practice.  His primary academic interest remains the role of the humanities in ethics education and the practice of moral medicine.

Harold J. (Hal) Cook, PhD, John F. Nickoll Professor of History, is an active member of the community of historians of medicine.  Originally from north of Chicago, with an undergraduate degree from Cornell College and a PhD from Michigan, he has taught and help responsible administrative posts at Harvard, Wisconsin-Madison and, from 2000 to 2010, University College London, where he was director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, the largest and most distinguished centre of its kind.

As for his own areas of expertise, Hal Cook has taught courses on medicine from antiquity to the present, mainly with a European focus, while he now also includes global history among his interests. His research publications have focused mainly on medicine from the 16^th to 18^th centuries, with particular attention to English and Dutch, and some global, changes. While the history of ideas and sciences has always been among his concerns, he has also published on legal history and medicine, and in recent years has made the relationships between economies and medicine one of his chief investigations. Writing well is as important to him as making an important academic argument, and two of his three books have been awarded prizes. He is happy to consult students who have any interest in the history of medicine. 

Christine Montross, MD, is a staff psychiatrist at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. She completed medical school and residency training at Brown University, where she received the Isaac Ray Award in Psychiatry and the Martin B. Keller Outstanding Brown Psychiatry Resident Award.  She received her undergraduate degrees and a MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, where she also taught writing classes as a lecturer. 

Dr. Montross has been named a 2010 MacColl Johnson fellow in Poetry, and the winner of the 2009 Eugene and Marilyn Glick Emerging Indiana Authors Award. She has had several poems published in literary journals, and her manuscript Embouchure was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She has also written for many national publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, Good Housekeeping and O, The Oprah Magazine.  Dr. Montross' first book, Body of Work, was named an Editors' Choice by The New York Times and one of The Washington Post's best nonfiction books of 2007.   More information about Dr. Montross and her work can be found at www.christinemontross.com.

Fred J. Schiffman, MD, is a hematologist/oncologist at Brown and Lifespan.  Dr. Schiffman is the Sigal Family Professor of Humanistic Medicine at Brown, vice chairman of the Department of Medicine of the Warren Alpert School of Medicine of Brown University, and associate director of the Categorical Residency Program at Brown.  He is associate physician-in-chief at The Miriam Hospital.  His areas of expertise include malignant and non-malignant hematological problems and disorders of the spleen. 

Dr. Schiffman is a graduate of NYU Medical School.  He completed his internship, residency and chief residency at Yale New Haven Hospital.  He spent two years at the National Cancer Institute as a research fellow.  Before coming to Brown, he was on the hematology faculty at Yale and was the Director of the Primary Care Center at Yale New Haven Hospital. 

Dr. Schiffman has published in a broad range of hematologic areas and also on a variety of subjects regarding the education of students and house staff.  He is the editor of a textbook on hematologic pathophysiology and several book chapters including one on diseases of the spleen. 

The recently awarded endowed professorship in humanistic medicine has allowed him to lead and participate in several programs.  He will serve as the head of the Humanities Section in the Division of Hematology/Oncology, which will encompass patient care, education and research activities.  He currently leads Schwartz Rounds Conferences at The Miriam Hospital and for the past three years has been the faculty advisor to the Gold Humanism Honor Society at Alpert Medical School.  He has organized several unique programs in the arts dealing with the interface between humanities and medicine. 

Dr. Schiffman has received numerous teaching awards and has been the speaker at Alpert Medical School commencement exercises and White Coat Ceremony.  Among his honors have been the Charles C. J. Carpenter M.D. Outstanding Physician of the Year Award, the Milton Hamolsky Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in the specialty of Internal Medicine, and the Human Dignity Award given by Home & Hospice Care of Rhode Island. 

Deb Salem Smith, MFA, is the playwright-in-residence at Trinity Repertory Company.  Her new play Love Alone received an Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award as well as an Honorable Mention by the National Jane Chambers Playwriting Award.  Her previous honors include an Emerging American Artist Fulbright for playwriting in Dublin, Ireland, where she worked with the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theater, and served as a Visiting Academic at the Trinity College School of Drama.  Her work has been recognized by a National Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Colby Fellowship, a Major Hopwood Award, as well as writing and visual arts prizes from the University of Michigan and Princeton University.  Her other plays include: Boots on the Ground,Some Things Are Private, Good Business, and Caviar.

Liz Tobin Tyler, JD, MA, is the director of public service and community partnerships and a lecturer in public interest law at Roger Williams University School of Law. She also serves as the co-director of the Scholarly Concentration in Advocacy and Activism at the Alpert Medical School at Brown University. Since 2003, she has taught a joint medical-legal course with faculty from the Alpert Medical School on the social determinants of health and the law. Ms. Tobin Tyler is a national leader in the development of medical-legal partnerships which provide legal assistance and promote policy changes to improve the health of vulnerable patients.  She is the senior editor of Poverty, Health and Law: Readings and Cases for Medical-Legal Partnership, published by Carolina Academic Press in 2011. She is chair of the board of directors for the Rhode Island Medical-Legal Partnership and also serves on the board of directors for the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership in Washington, DC. 

Prior to her work at Roger Williams University School of Law, Ms. Tobin Tyler served as a consulting attorney to Health and Education Leadership for Providence on childhood lead paint poisoning and housing code issues, and served as a policy analyst at Rhode Island Kids Count, a child advocacy and policy organization. From 2000-2004, she was a visiting lecturer at Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy where she taught family law and policy. She is a graduate of Northeastern University School of Law and holds an MA in english and a BA in humanities from the University of Texas at Austin.

Arnold Weinstein, MA, PhD, received his BA in romance languages from Princeton and his MA and PhD in comparative literature from Harvard. Dr. Weinstein came to Brown in 1968 and became a full professor in 1978. He was named to the Henry Merritt Wriston Chair in 1990, and he became the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature in 1995.

Dr. Weinstein’s main work in the area of medical humanities is his book, A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life (Random House, 2003). It is a book-length study of issues and texts Dr. Weinstein has encountered in his 'Literature and Medicine' courses at Brown over the past 2 decades. Dr Weinstein was also an associate editor for a number of years at the journal, Literature and Medicine, and edited a volume on 'Contagion and Infection' in 2003.

Dr. Weinstein’s work covers a good bit of ground, with books on European, American, and Scandinavian literature, beginning with Vision and Response in Modern Fiction (Cornell UP, 1974) and continuing up to his most recent book, Morning, Noon and Night (Random House, February 2011). Other books include The Fiction of Relationship  (Princeton UP, 1988), Nobody's Home: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo (Oxford UP,  1993), Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison (Random House, 2006) and Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art from Ibsen to Bergman (Princeton UP, 2008).

Dr. Weinstein has done 200 lectures on world literature in DVD and CD format for The Teaching Company.

Deborah Wilde graduated from Vassar College in art history and subsequently received her MA and PhD from New York University. Her dissertation focused on housing and urban development in Rome in the 16th century. After living in Rome for many years, she worked at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and then at the Getty Art History Information Program before joining the staff of the RISD Museum of Art.

Brian J. Zink, MD,  is professor and inaugural chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and physician-in-chief of emergency medicine at Rhode Island, The Miriam and Hasbro Children’s Hospitals since July 2006. 

Dr. Zink received his MD. from the University of Rochester, and did his emergency medicine training and was Chief Resident at the University of Cincinnati (1984-1988). Dr. Zink was a faculty member in emergency medicine at Albany Medical College from 1988 to 1992 and then joined the new emergency medicine program at the University of Michigan where he was a faculty member for 14 years. He was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure in 1998.  From 1999 to 2006, Dr. Zink served in the University of Michigan Medical School Dean’s office, first as assistant dean for Medical Student Career Development, then as associate dean for Student Programs.

Dr. Zink served on the board of directors of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) from 1996-2002, and was president of SAEM in 2000-2001. Dr. Zink’s scholarly interests include brain injury and trauma and medical student career development. He also has a long-standing interest in writing and medical arts and humanities. He won the national medical student William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize in 1983, and has continued to write poetry and creative essays throughout his career. In 2006, he authored the book Anyone, Anything, Anytime – A History of Emergency Medicine.  In 2007, he received the SAEM Academic Excellence Award and in 2008 received the American College of Emergency Physicians Outstanding Contribution in Education Award. Dr. Zink is on the board of trustees of Rhode Island Hospital and Rhode Island Sound Enterprises.