Rosa Lynn Pinkus, PhD, an historian, served as Director of the Center’s Consortium Ethics Program from 1990 through 2013. She has extensive experience as a healthcare ethics consultant and taught applied ethics for thirty-eight years, including in the Department of Bioengineering. She received her PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo and completed a fellowship in the Medical Humanities at Penn State Hershey. She joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1980 and retired as Professor of Medicine from the University in December 2013. During her first decades at the University, she served as an ethics consultant in University hospitals.
As a pioneer in using a case-based approach in interprofessional clinical and classroom teaching, she published numerous articles and two books. She is lead author of Engineering Ethics: Balancing Cost, Risk and Schedules: Lessons Learned from the Space Shuttle (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and co-author, with Mark Kuczewski, of An Ethics Casebook for Hospitals: Practical Approaches to Everyday Ethics (Georgetown University Press, 1999). Her NSF-funded interdisciplinary research sought to understand why a case-based approach is effective in teaching professional ethics. Select publications include:
Pinkus RL, Claire Gloeckner & Angela Fortunato. The Role of Professional Knowledge in Case-Based Reasoning in Practical Ethics, Science and Engineering Ethics 21 (3):767-787 (2015).
Goldin, I., Pinkus, RL, & Ashley, K. D. Validity and reliability of an instrument for assessing case analysis in bioengineering ethics education, Science and Engineering Ethics 21 (3): 788-809 (2015).
Pinkus RL, Shuman L. “Cicero’s Creed” in Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering, 2nd Edition (ESTE-2), Macmillan Publishing (2014).
Pinkus RL, Smetanka SL, Kottkamp NA. “Suzie’s Voice” in Complex Ethical Consultations: Cases that Haunt Us (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
