Dr. Laura Roberts is the founder and former Director of the University of New
Mexico Health Sciences Center Institute for Ethics. She also Directs the
Empirical Ethics Group, a clinical ethics research team founded in 1996 in the
Department of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. A
clinical ethicist and NIMH-funded Career Scientist, Dr. Roberts is now Professor
and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine at the Medical
College of Wisconsin.
Dr. Roberts received her Bachelor of Arts (History), Master of Arts (Philosophy), and Doctor of Medicine degrees at the University of Chicago where she also completed a fellowship in Clinical Medical Ethics. She performed her residency training at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and has since remained on faculty.
Dr. Roberts' scholarly work has focused on six lines of conceptual and empirical study, all related to ethical issues in research, clinical care, and education involving special populations. These topics of study include the ethical dimensions of: informed consent (including information sharing, decisional capacity, and voluntarism); surrogate decision-making; health care for physicians-in-training; rural health care; end-of-life care; genetics; stigmatizing illnesses; and family, cultural, and community perspectives in clinical care and research. Dr. Roberts educational endeavors have focused on developmentally-attuned professionalism training initiatives in medical education and the assessment of professionalism and clinical ethics skills in physicians and physicians-in-training.
Dr. Roberts has served as the Principal Investigator on numerous grants from the National Institues of Health (NIMH, NIDA), the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD), the U.S. Department of Energy, the Arnold P. Gold Foundation, and other private foundations. Dr. Roberts is a consultant on challenging clinical ethics cases and has led ethics committee activities in several settings. She seeks to improve the care of people with serious illnesses through multiple avenues on local, regional and national levels.
