Our People
Marion Danis, MD
Marion Danis attended college and medical school at the University of Chicago. She trained in Internal Medicine and subsequently received an NIEHS-funded postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served on the faculty of the Division of General Medicine and Clinical Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina between 1978 and 1997. While at UNC she directed the Medical Intensive Care Unit and chaired the UNC Hospitals Ethics Committee. She has also chaired the Ethics committee of the Society of Critical Care Medicine. In 1997 she joined the Department of Bioethics in the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health where she serves as Chief of the Bioethics Consultation Service and Head of the Section on Ethics and Health Policy.
She has had a long-standing interest in patient preferences and how they are incorporated into medical practice. She has conducted studies in end-of-life decision making and on advance directives. Her work currently focuses on finding ways to balance the competing concerns of respect for patient autonomy and the need to distribute limited resources fairly. As Head of the Section on Ethics and Health Policy, she is interested in promoting scholarship that connects deliberation about ethical values with health policy.
