Michelle Carter, PhDProfessor, Institute for Medical Humanities
Secondary Department - Preventative Medicine and Community Health
Michele A. Carter is the Courtney Townsend Professor in Medical Ethics at UTMB and a member of the Institute for the Medical Humanities. After completing with a major in nursing at The University of Hawaii in 1972, she practiced Oncology nursing for 13 years. Dr. Carter received the Master of Science degree in Nursing from Texas Women's University in 1982. For the next six years, she pursued doctoral studies in philosophy at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and was awarded the Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1989. She was awarded a Post-doctoral Fellowship in Clinical and Research Ethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health, later serving as the Acting Chief of the Bioethics Program at the NIH Clinical Center. Dr. Carter was a Senior Research Fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University and a Visiting Clinical Scholar at the Center for Bioethics at Georgetown University Medical School. Dr. Carter holds dual positions as Associate Professor, Preventive Medicine and Community Health and Director of the Institutional Ethics Program. Dr. Carter has served as Bioethics Consultant to numerous federal agencies, professional health care organizations, academic programs, and civic groups. In 2001, she was appointed as the Research Subject Advocate of the General Clinical Research Unit at UTMB and in 2005, with the Dr. Leon Bromberg Professor for Excellence in Teaching. Her areas of research include ethical dimensions of human subjects research, cancer genetics, end-of-life decision making and concepts of trust.