Our Director
Mark Siegler, M.D., is the Lindy Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Chicago, the Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and the Director of the Bucksbaum Institute for Clincial Excellence. In 1984, The University of Chicago established the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, the first program in the nation devoted to this clinical specialty, and appointed Dr. Siegler as the Center’s Director.
An honors graduate of Princeton University, Dr. Siegler received his medical degree in 1967 from The University of Chicago. He was intern, resident and Chief Resident in Medicine at The University of Chicago, followed by a year of advanced training at the Hammersmith-Royal Postgraduate Hospital in London, England. In 1972 he joined The University of Chicago faculty, organizing and directing one of the early medical intensive care units. This experience with critically ill patients introduced him to a range of ethical problems that he continues to investigate, teach and write about to the present time.
Dr. Siegler has practiced general internal medicine on Chicago’s south side for more than 40 years and is one of the few physicians who combines expertise in medical ethics with an active medical practice. Dr. Siegler’s research interests include the ethics of surgical innovation, living donor organ transplantation, end of life care, ethics consultation, and decision making within the doctor patient relationship. He has published more than 200 journal articles, 50 book chapters and five books. Siegler’s seminal 1981 paper, “Searching for Moral Certainty in Medicine: A Proposal for a New Model of the Doctor Patient Encounter,” was cited repeatedly by the President’s Commission in their 1983 report, Making Health Care Decisions, as the basis for recommending a shared decision making approach for doctors and patients, an approach that has since become the standard model for the doctor patient relationship in the U.S. His textbook, co-authored with Al Jonsen and William Winslade, Clinical Ethics: A Practical Approach to Ethical Decisions in Clinical Medicine, 7th Edition (2010), has been translated into eight languages and is widely used by physicians and health professionals around the world.
Dr. Siegler is a Fellow of the Hastings Center, an elected member of the Association of American Physicians (AAP), and recently completed serving on the Board of Trustees of Princeton University. For six years, Dr. Siegler served as Chair of the Ethics Committee of the NIH-sponsored Immune Tolerance Network and has also served on the Ethics Committee of the American College of Physicians. He has been on the Ethics Committee of the American College of Surgeons for the past 18 years.
For a copy of Dr. Siegler's CV, please click here.