Dr. Thomasine K. Kushner, who with UM surgeon Donald M. Buckner, helped initiate the first weekly “ethics rounds,” in the neonatal critical care unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital in the 1980s, died on February 2, 2025, in Greenbrae, California.
One of the first women in the field of bioethics in the early 1980s, “Tomi” was a faculty member in UM’s Department of Psychiatry, Medicine and Behavioral Sciences, and in the Philosophy Department at Florida International University.
As ethics coordinator for the UM Health and Human Values program (the precursor to the Miller School of Medicine’s Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy) she developed ethics courses, co-founded the first clinical ethics committee at Jackson Memorial Hospital and, with Dr. Buckner, established ethics rounds in the Department of Pediatric Surgery.
Those weekly “ethics rounds,” in Jackson’s neonatal critical care unit apparently constitute the first formal effort to integrate ethics into U.S. hospital practice. Tomi once wrote, “It was, to my knowledge, the first of its kind anywhere.”
She received her PhD in Philosophy (specializing in Aesthetics) from the University of Florida, with additional study completed at the University of Stirling.
She founded and served as editor of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, a leading peer-reviewed journal. It was the first medical or bioethics journal to feature a section on ethics and health information technology, including Artificial Intelligence.
Tomi Kushner, front row, second from left, hosted an annual Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education meeting in Paris in 2014. Photo by Jack Schultz, Studio LightPlay; used with permission.
Leaving Miami in 1985, she joined University of California, Berkeley, as Executive Officer for the Committee for Protection of Human Subjects and oversaw research ethics. She later served as Clinical Professor of Bioethics in the UCSF/Berkeley Joint Medical Program and as Senior Research Fellow in the Human Rights Center. For 15 years, she taught bioethics to medical students at Berkeley and supervised bioethics graduate work in the School of Public Health. She served as principal investigator on the first national grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Education to develop curricula in healthcare ethics for hospital ethics committees and was instrumental in the formation of ethics committees at several hospitals in Northern California.
After retiring from Berkeley, Tomi joined Sutter Health's Program in Medicine and Human Values in San Francisco where she continued to mentor fellows and clinical ethicists.
In addition to founding and editing one of the world’s leading bioethics journals, she contributed extensively to the bioethics literature, authoring and editing numerous scholarly articles and books. Some highlights include the “What Do I Do Now?” column for the student British Medical Journal; Birth to Death: Science and Bioethics (Cambridge University Press); Asking to Die: Inside the Dutch Debate about Euthanasia (Kluwer Academic Publishers); Ward Ethics: A Case Book for Doctors-in-Training (Cambridge University Press); Surviving Health Care: A Guide for Patients and Their Families (Cambridge University Press); and the most recent Cambridge University Press’ Elements Series on Bioethics and Neuroethics. She founded and organized several professional conferences including the International Bioethics Retreat, Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education, and the ICM Neuroethics Network.
