Susan Owen, PhD: Medical Ethicist

Susan Owen received her AB from Princeton University, where she studied theological ethics with Paul Ramsey, and her PhD from the University of Virginia, where she studied religious and medical ethics with Jim Childress, who also supervised her dissertation   “Forgiveness and a Return to the Good.”  She is dually trained as a chaplain and an ethicist.  She completed intensive lay chaplaincy training over a two-year period through the Department of Religious Ministries at Yale-New Haven Hospital, where she was assigned to work part-time at Gaylord Rehabilitation Hospital with persons who had suffered traumatic injuries and their families, and to work full-time the following year on the cardiac floors and in the emergency department at Yale New-Haven Hospital.

Dr. Owen has taught and spoken about ethics and bioethics at universities, professional schools, nursing homes, and churches throughout Greater New Haven and Fairfield Counties.  She taught part-time for six years in the Department of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University, where she taught bioethics and the life sciences, introduction to ethics, introduction to philosophy, and philosophy of ethics.  She also taught a course on Bioethics at Yale Divinity School and to nursing students at Sacred Heart University.  Dr. Owen served for three years on the Yale Department of  Psychiatry Protocol Review Committee (PDPRC) and is completing a project with Howard Zonana, MD, entitled “Ethical Analysis of Selected Issues in Psychiatric Research:  A Comparison of the NBAC Framework and the PDPRC Process.”  As a researcher and co-editor with the Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Center, she began and is currently completing a volume “The Future of Therapeutic Cloning” with Marguerite Strobel, MDiv, MS, and Brian Sorrells, MDiv, MA.

Her special interests include respect and care for persons with cognitive impairments; psychiatric research ethics; guilt related to discontinuation of life-sustaining treatment that caregivers may experience, even when patient advance directives are in place; and working to decrease the massive gap between theory and bedside in the study and application of health care ethics.