Mercedes Bern-Klug, PhD, MSW

is Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa School of Social Work with a joint appointment in the Aging Studies Program, where she develops and teaches undergraduate interdisciplinary courses (Introduction to Nursing Homes; Older Adulthood: Cultural Comparisons; and Basic Aspects of Aging). In the School of Social Work she teaches research methods and advises students interested in social gerontology and palliative care.

Mercedes received a doctorate degree in Social Welfare from the University of Kansas in 2003 (Dissertation: The Social Construction of Dying in the Nursing Home Setting: Implications for Social Work. Chair: Dr. Rosemary Chapin). She earned a masters degree from Georgetown University in Applied Demography and an MSW (with a Certificate in Aging Studies) from the University of Iowa.

Areas of scholarship include the overlap between: older adulthood; advanced chronic illness; and psychosocial issues in long-term care settings. With funding from the PDIA and Hartford Foundation, Mercedes has focused most of her research efforts on end-of-life issues in nursing home settings. Last summer she collected data from over 1,000 nursing home social services directors and is in the process of developing manuscripts to: describe the characteristics of the work force; explain social work involvement in nursing homes; and describe the resources needed by social workers to better meet the psychosocial needs of people living and dying as nursing home residents.

She serves on the Council of Palliative Care (American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine), the editorial board of The Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care, and the review panel for The Journal of Gerontological Nursing. She is a member of the Council on Social Work Education’s Task Force on Latinos in Social Work. She has served as a volunteer Alzheimer Disease support group leader for 12 years. Mercedes currently serves as a board member to “Up Town Bills” a coffee shop/book store that provides entrepreneurial skills to people with disabilities. She is a founding member of the Iowa NASW Committee on Aging.

Karen Bullock, PhD, LCSW

is an Associate Professor at North Carolina State University Department of Social Work and a Hartford Faculty Scholar in Geriatric Social Work, with professional interests in health care disparities; cultural competence in the delivery of mental health service and clinical practice with individuals, couples, and families. She holds an appointment as a senior research scientist at the Institute of Living at Hartford Hospital and has conducted a number of studies that focused specifically on Latino and African Americans’ health and mental health issues. Dr. Bullock serves on a number of community boards including the North Central Area Agency on Aging and the Connecticut Coalition to Improve Care at End of Life.

John Cagle, MSW, PhD

is a Carolina Program in Health and Aging Research (CPHAR) Fellow at the University of North Carolina Institute on Aging under the mentorship of Dr. Sheryl Zimmerman. He has more than 10 years of clinical experience as a hospice social worker, during which he provided counseling, support, and education to seriously ill individuals and their families. His current research interests focus on improving the quality-of-care and quality-of-life of persons coping with life-threatening illness, their families and caregivers. He has taught at Florida State University as a part-time faculty member and at the University of North Carolina as adjunct faculty. He has published extensively on end-of-life and palliative care issues relating to terminal illness, aging and hospice.

In 2006, John was awarded a two-year dissertation fellowship through the John A. Hartford foundation and the Geriatric Social Work Initiative for his research on informal caregivers of advanced cancer patients. His work was also supported by the McGrath-Morris Residency & Fellowship, a two-week writing retreat in the spring of 2008, and mentorships through the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.

Ellen Csikai, LCSW, MPH, PhD

Ellen Csikai, LCSW, MPH, PhD, is the Editor of The Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care, Professor of Social Work at the University of Alabama, and a board member of the Social Work Hospice & Palliative Care Network (SWHPN). She has published extensively on issues relating to social work in end-of-life care, health care, bioethics, and professional ethics. Csikai was previously a recipient of the Social Work Leadership Development Award from the Open Society Institute’s Project on Death in America and was a key advisor in the formation of SWHPN. She holds PhD, MPH, MSW and BSW degrees from the University of Pittsburgh.

Grace H. Christ, PhD

is Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work and has clinical and research interests in the fields of psychosocial oncology, end-of-life and palliative care, and interventions in childhood bereavement and traumatic loss.

Among other publications, she is the author of Healing Children’s Grief: Surviving a parent’s death from cancer, published in 2000 by Oxford University Press and author of a recent article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on “Adolescent Grief”. These publications identify through systematic analysis of 157 bereaved children, clinically relevant patterns of experience and expression of grief to parent loss at 5 different developmental levels. In 2004 Healing Children’s Grief was recognized by the International Association of Palliative Care leadership as one of 12 books providing critical new directions to the field for the 21st century.

Dr. Christ was the director of the Social Work Leadership Development Awards Program of the Project on Death in America (PDIA), and co-chair of the 1st and 2nd Social Work Summits on End-of-Life and Palliative Care, the preliminary meetings which helped shape the Social Work Hospice & Palliative Care Network. She is also Director of the FDNY/Columbia University Family Assessment and Guidance Program, a program providing both intervention and research on the processes of recovery for families in which a firefighter father was killed in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Findings about the intervention model and the families’ adaptation appear in the book FDNY Crisis Counseling: Innovative Responses to Firefighters, Families and Communities.

Dr. Christ was a Senior Faculty Scholar with PDIA, a recipient of the National American Cancer Society’s Distinguished Service Award, and recipient of the American Hospice and Palliative Care Organization’s 2001 research award. She was formerly Director of Social Work at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Daniel S. Gardner, PhD, LCSW

is an Assistant Professor at the NYU School of Social Work and a Hartford Faculty Scholar in Geriatric Social Work, with professional interests in social gerontology; oncology, end-of-life and palliative care; health care practice and policy; clinical practice with individuals, couples, and families; and program evaluation and social work research.

Prior to joining the NYU faculty in 2005, Dr. Gardner held faculty positions at Columbia University and Hunter College (CUNY), teaching generalist and advanced clinical practice as well as courses on aging, health care policy and practice, and social work research methods. Dr. Gardner graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in Human Development and Family Studies, received an MSW degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, and a doctorate in Social Work from Columbia University. He completed a post-master’s certificate program in clinical social work from the Pennsylvania Society for Clinical Social Workers, and has held clinical licensure in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York.

Dr. Gardner has over 20 years of social work practice experience with individuals, families, and groups. This includes ten years in hospital and community-based health care organizations, specializing in clinical practice with individuals and families living with cancer or with HIV/AIDS. He has also provided individual, group, couples, and family therapy to children and adults in a variety of agency and private settings. Dr. Gardner has extensive supervisory, administrative, and program development experience. For six years, he directed the counseling department of a large family service agency, overseeing prevention and behavioral health programs for children, adolescents, adults, and older adults. One consistent theme in his practice has been a commitment to supporting the efforts of individuals and families to manage health-related transitions and crises.

Dr. Gardner’s research interests include health and aging; end-of-life care; and the role of familial and social relationships in managing chronic and terminal illness. He is a member of the RAND Interdisciplinary Geriatric Center at NYU, has been a research consultant and program evaluator for the Gerontological Society of America and the Hartford Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholars Program, and a research assistant and project coordinator on several NIH-funded grants at the Center for the Psychosocial Study of Health and Illness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. As a doctoral student, Dr. Gardner received a Ruth Fizdale Doctoral Dissertation Award, an American Cancer Society Doctoral Training Grant, and was a Hartford Doctoral Fellow in Geriatric Social Work. His current research includes the development and evaluation of a psychoeducational intervention for individuals at end-of-life and their familial healthcare proxies.

Barbara Head, PhD, RN, CHPN, ACSW

is currently a faculty member at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in the Interdisciplinary Program for Palliative Care and Chronic Illness (IPPCCI). The goals of this program are to promote palliative care research and education throughout the University and community. IPPCCI recently received R25 research funding from the National Cancer Institute to develop and test an interdisciplinary curriculum involving social work, nursing, medical and chaplaincy students in team oriented learning. She serves as social work faculty for the palliative medicine fellowship program. She is also adjunct faculty for the Kent School of Social Work where she teaches a graduate Death and Grief course and the School of Public Health where she teaches public policy advocacy.

Barbara is a member of the University of Louisville Hospital’s Ethics committee, president of the Louisville Chapter of the Oncology Nursing Society, secretary/treasurer of the HOPE chapter of the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association, and a board member of the Kentucky Chapter of the Lung Cancer Alliance. She has led research studies on prognostication, supportive oncology, telehealth in advanced cancer and palliative care case management for Medicaid patients. For her dissertation work she developed and validated a scale to measure socioeconomic well-being as a dimension of health related quality of life.

Prior to her doctoral studies and work at the University, Barbara worked at Hospice and Palliative Care of Louisville where she served as a home hospice nurse, director of quality improvement and director of education. She served as member and president of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization’s Standards and Accreditation committee and the National Board for Certification of Hospice and Palliative Nurses. In 2000, she received NHPCO’s Heart of Hospice Award honoring the administrator of the year.

Barbara L. Jones, PhD, LMSW

is President of the Association of Pediatric Oncology Social Workers (APOSW) and Assistant Professor at the UT Austin School of Social Work where she is also Co-Director of The Institute for Grief, Loss and Family Survival.

Dr. Jones was a Social Work Leader in the Open Society Institute’s Project on Death in America and principal investigator on a study of the role of social work in pediatric palliative care. Dr. Jones serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life Care (Haworth Press) and has written articles on the needs of children and families at the end-of-life. She is a member of the Alliance for Childhood Cancer.

Dr. Jones’ extensive clinical experience has been primarily in the field of children’s loss, pediatric palliative and end-of-life care, grief, trauma, and survival. Most recently she was the Director of Pediatric Programs at the Center for Advanced Illness Coordinated Care and a Clinical Faculty member and Senior Clinical Social Worker at Albany Medical Center Children’s Cancer Center. Previously she was the Coordinator of the Children’s Bereavement Program at St. Peter’s Hospice in NY. Dr. Jones has served as a Steering Committee Member of the National Alliance for Children with Life Threatening Conditions (NACWLTC), Chairperson of the NACWLTC Clinical Models Work Group, member of the Children’s Oncology Group End-Of-Life Committee and member of the New York State Children’s Hospice and Palliative Care Advisory Group.

Dr. Jones consults and lectures nationally on issues of pediatric palliative care, grief and loss, and the role of social work in health care. Her newest research project is a study of the meaning of surviving cancer for Hispanic/Latino adolescents funded by a grant from the Center for Health Promotion Research at the UT School of Nursing. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Master of Social Work, and PhD in Social Work at the University at Albany, New York State.

Sanford Klein, DDS, MD

was founding professor and Chairman of the department of Anesthesia at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, a position he served for 16 years. The author of many articles and a popular textbook, he remains a professor at the Medical School, teaching, counseling and lecturing.

A product of the New York City School System through the Bronx High School of Science, Dr. Klein received a Dentistry degree from NYU and an MD degree from Albany Medical College. He became a board certified Anesthesiologist in 1975 and joined the faculty at the University of Iowa.

Dr. Klein’s interest in end of life issues was sparked by the end stage high tech care he was working with on Intensive Care Units. It was usual to pour enormous resources into what turned out to be the patient’s last days of life, which, to Dr. Klein, seemed wasteful and undignified. He joined the Board of Directors at New Jersey Heath Decisions over a decade ago to help promote humane end of life decisions.

Colleen Mulkerin, MSW, LCSW

is a Clinical Social Worker employed at Hartford Hospital since 1992 and Director of the Palliative Medicine Consult Service. She has been involved in local as well as national initiatives relating to palliative care in intensive care settings. The Palliative Care Consult Service at Hartford Hospital, which she helped to establish, saw over 1000 patients in its first year and has continued to grow. She collaborated with VHA faculty for development of integrated Palliative Medicine approaches in Intensive Care Units. Published “Improving Comfort and Communication in the ICU: A Practical New Tool for Palliative Care Performance Measurement and Feedback” Qual Saf Health Care 2006. She was an advisor to the ICU Palliative Care Initiative of the Veterans’ Integrated Service Network 3. She is a member of the IPAL-ICU Advisory Board: Improving Palliative Care in the ICU Project.

Mulkerin is a graduate from the University Of Connecticut School Of Social Work. She obtained her Master’s in Social Work in 1990 and her Bachelor’s in Social Work from Daemen College in 1984. In 2003 she obtained a certificate and completed a Fellowship in End-of-Life Care at Smith College School for Social Work. Prior to Hartford Hospital, Ms. Mulkerin was employed as a social worker at Gaylord Hospital, an Inpatient Acute Rehabilitation Program. Her primary focus was with people with Acquired Brain Injuries.

Debra Parker Oliver, MSW, PhD

is an Associate Professor in the Curtis W. and Ann H Long Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Missouri. She holds a Masters in Social Work and a PhD in Rural Sociology, both from the University of Missouri. Dr Parker Oliver was an Assistant and Associate Professor in the MU School of Social Work until 2007 and also served as the Director of Graduate and Doctoral Studies. In July 2007 she moved to the School of Medicine to devote more time to her research. Dr Parker Oliver’s research goals are to improve the delivery of hospice care. She has 70 peer reviewed publications.

In 2006 she received her first grant from the National Institute of Health-National Cancer Institute for an exploratory study in hospice care. This mixed methods intervention study focused on using telehealth technology to allow family caregivers the opportunity to attend hospice interdisciplinary team meetings. In 2008, as a Co-Investigator, she received a similar grant from the Nursing Institute for Nursing Research for an intervention study using telehealth technology to assist hospice caregivers teaching them problem solving. In 2010 she will begin a 4 year randomized clinical trial, funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research, to follow up on the her earlier work involving family in hospice team meetings.

In addition to her research and teaching, Dr Parker Oliver was a founder of the Missouri End of Life Coalition and served on the Board of Directors for ten years and as President for two years. She is also a former President of the Missouri Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and a former Hospice Director for Community Hospices in Columbia, Missouri and Hands of Hope Hospice in St Joseph, Missouri. Finally, she is looking forward to becoming the new Editor in Chief for Research on Aging, a national peer reviewed journal in gerontology.

Stacy Orloff, EdD, LCSW

is the Vice President of Palliative Care and Community Programs for the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast in Clearwater, Florida and has over 17 years of experience in pediatric hospice and palliative care. Dr. Orloff serves on several task forces through the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, including the social work steering committee. She serves as chair of the organization’s Social Work Outcomes Workgroup and is also co-chair of the Children’s Project on Palliative/Hospice Services. Dr. Orloff has presented at many national conferences. She also serves as Florida’s hospice representative on the state steering committee for the Partners in Care: Together for Kids, a palliative care waiver program in partnership with the Department of Health, Children’s Medical Services and the Agency for Health Care Administration. She has published in several peer reviewed books and journals and has co-edited two books. Dr. Orloff holds a doctorate degree in Organizational Leadership.

Judith R. Peres, LCSW-C

is currently working as an Expert Consultant in the Nursing Home and Palliative end-of-life care areas and as a clinical social worker serving Medicare Beneficiaries. She recently worked for five years with the Department of Health and Human Services in the Assistant Secretary’s Office for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) in that capacity, she managed and developed the Report to Congress on Advance Care Planning: http://aspe.hhs.gov/daltcp/reports/2008/adcongrpt.htm. Prior to joining ASPE, She was the Vice President for Policy & Advocacy of the former Last Acts Partnership and the Deputy Director of Last Acts, a National Program Office, funded by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to improve care and caring near the end of life. In those roles she developed major policy pieces speaking to the need to improve end-of-life care in this country, including Means to A Better End, the first national report care on the state of dying in the US: http://www.rwjf.org/files/publications/other/meansbetterend.pdf .

Her career spans over three decades in both health policy and direct clinical work. Ms. Peres served as Director of Health Policy for the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, specializing in quality, reimbursement, and long-term care workforce issues. She also held the position of Director of Health Policy for the Villers Foundation (currently Families USA) focusing on the needs of low income elders. In addition, she had a distinguished career in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement and financing policy for the US Department of Health and Human Services. Her clinical practice includes Employee Assistance Program work for the Sheppard Pratt Institute in Baltimore, Maryland and as a practicing psychotherapist for Kaiser Permanente with a specialty in cognitive behavioral therapy and mind/body health.

Ms. Peres has a Master in Social Work from the University of Maryland and additional training at the Mind/Body Institute in Washington, DC and Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy at the Albert Ellis Institute in New York.

Tracy Schroepfer, PhD, MSW

is Associate Professor and Director of Part-Time Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Social Work.

Dr. Schroepfer is currently working on several areas of research, the first of which is focused on gaining knowledge of the psychosocial and physical factors that motivate terminally ill elders to either consider or not consider a hastened death. Over the past two years, she has interviewed 200 terminally ill elders regarding the psychosocial and physical factors that motivated them to either consider or not consider a hastened death. The quantitative and qualitative results will be used to inform policy makers and practitioners working to improve the palliative care offered to terminally ill elders.

The second area of research on which Dr. Schroepfer is currently working focuses on reducing cancer health disparities in medically underserved communities in Wisconsin. She and fellow researchers are currently working in eight communities using a community-based participatory approach to assessing the readiness of the community to address cancer, as well as assessing the care provided to community members who have had cancer, currently have cancer, or who have been given a terminal cancer diagnosis. Once the assessments are complete, the research team will sit down with community members to set action priorities and decide how best to implement programs or policies to address the priorities.

Dr. Schroepfer was selected as both a Hartford Doctoral Fellow and a Hartford Faculty Scholar in Geriatric Social Work. At the University of Arkansas she obtained a BA in Sociology and an MA in Gerontology, and an MSW and PhD in Social Work/Sociology from the University of Michigan.

Gary L. Stein, JD, MSW

is an Associate Professor in the Wurzweiler School of Social Work at New York City’s Yeshiva University, bringing more ethics curriculum and discussion to the university. His courses include Social Welfare Organization, Social Work in Health Care, and Social Policy, a doctoral class. Stein has been commissioned to write a paper for the RAND Corporation, on behalf of the US Department of Health and Human Services, regarding advance care planning as it applies to people with disabilities.

Previously he served as executive director of New Jersey Health Decisions, having joined the organization in November 1998. He was responsible for developing and administering projects to promote end-of-life care, informed health care decision-making, and citizen involvement in health issues. He has been principal investigator of: the New Jersey Comfort Care Coalition, under the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Community-State Partnerships to Improve End-of-Life Care; the End-of-Life Care Fellowship for Social Workers under the Soros Foundation Network — Project on Death in America’s Social Work Leadership Development Awards; and the Project on Health Decisions for People with Disabilities under grants from the Soros Foundation Network — Project on Death in America, the State of New Jersey, the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey, and the Kessler Foundation. He co-authored a chapter on “Palliative Care for People with Disabilities,” which is included in Living with Dying: A Social Work Textbook in End of Life Care, Columbia University Press, 2004. Mr. Stein was a consultant to Partnership in Caring, through which he completed the Project on Health Care Attitudes in the Lesbian and Gay Community; articles from this study were published in 2001 in the Journal of Palliative Medicine and the Journal of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association. Mr. Stein was project director for the HIV Professional Development Project and the Palliative Care Leadership Development Program at the New York Academy of Medicine.

Mr. Stein received a Certificate in Bioethics and the Medical Humanities from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University/Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1998. He also received advance bioethics training at Georgetown University and Montefiore Medical Center/New York University Division of Nursing. He received his J.D. (cum laude) from the New York Law School; M.S.W. (clinical practice) from the Rutgers University Graduate School of Social Work; and A.B. (psychology) from Rutgers College. Stein previously taught at Seton Hall, Drew, and Kean Universities.

Katherine Walsh, PhD, MSW

as a Professor at the Springfield College School of Social Work, designs and teaches courses in social work practice with vulnerable and resilient populations, family therapy, therapeutic applications of adventure and loss and grief. During her 27 years as an oncology social worker in a variety of settings, she was a senior social worker and student supervisor at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Director of Psychosocial Services at Hospice/VNA Alliance of Hampshire County, and private practitioner of individual, group and family therapy.

She is the Immediate Past President of the Association of Oncology Social Work (AOSW) and a co-author of the C-Penn Award winning Cancer Survival Toolbox, a collaborative project of AOSW, the Oncology Nursing Society and the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship. Her Social Work Leadership Development Award from the Project on Death in America in 2000 developed curriculum in end-of-life care for masters and post-masters level social workers as well as allied health professionals.

Dr. Walsh received the American Cancer Society’s Trish Greene Quality of Life Award of Excellence in 2001 and the Social Work Leadership Award from the Association of Oncology Social Work in 2002. She serves on the Medical Advisory Committee of the NE Division of the American Cancer Society, as Children’s Activities Coordinator for the Massachusetts We Can Weekend, an annual retreat for families affected by cancer, and on the professional advisory committee of Cancer Connection, a community organization in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Her textbook, Loss and grief: Theories and skills for helping professionals was published by Allyn & Bacon in April of 2005. Other recent publications include Walsh-Burke, K. and Zebrack, B. “Advocacy needs of adolescent and young adult survivors of cancer: Perspectives of pediatric oncology social work leaders” Journal of Psychosocial Oncology; Walsh-Burke, K. “Mental health risk assessment” in Berzoff, J. and Silverman, P. (Eds) (2004). Living with dying: A handbook for end of life healtcare professionals, New York: Columbia University Press.; Walsh-Burke, K. “Advanced generalist social work and managed care” in Roy, A. and Vecchiolla, F. (Eds). Advanced Generalist Social Work. E.Bauer Press; Taylor-Brown, S., Altilio, T., Blacker, S., Christ, G. and Walsh-Burke,K. (2001). Care at the End of Life. Society for Leadership in Social Work and Health Care Best Practices Monograph, Walsh-Burke, K. (2000). “Matching Bereavement Services to Level of Need”, The Hospice Journal, 15(1), 77-86.

Sheryl Zimmerman, PhD

is Kenan Flagler Bingham Distinguished Professor and Director of Aging Research, School of Social Work; Adjunct Distinguished Professor, Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health; Co-Director, Program on Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Care, Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research; and Lead Director, Interdisciplinary Center for Aging Research, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been conducting research in long-term care settings for almost 20 years, and co-directs the Collaborative Studies of Long-Term Care, a consortium of more than 700 nursing homes and assisted living settings across the country that have participated in almost 60 research projects.

Dr. Zimmerman is expert on matters related to end-of-life and palliative care and outcomes in long-term care, having studied this topic among more than 1000 decedents from 350 different settings. In addition, she has developed publicly-available research measures for use in this area, such as related to the quality of dying (the QOD-LTC), family-physician communication (the FPPFC), and hospice attitudes (the HAS-LTC). Further, Dr. Zimmerman conducts clinical trials related to end-of-life and palliative care in nursing homes and assisted living settings. Dr. Zimmerman was a member of the Palliative Care Quality Measurement Technical Expert Panel and the Palliative Care Symptom Assessment and Goals of Care Minimum Data Set for Nursing Homes.