People

David Hershenov, PhD, is a professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo and director of the Romanell Center. His earlier research was focused upon issues at the intersection of personal identity and bioethics. His recent research interests are in the philosophy of medicine.

Harvey Berman is a pharmacologist responsible for teaching Doctors of Pharmacy (PharmD) and of Medicine (MD) in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. His teaching and research interests are in adverse drug interactions, pharmacogenomics, ethics of drug clinical trials, pain palliation and geriatric pharmacology.

Kurt Blankschaen, PhD (Boston University) is an assistant professor of philosophy at Daemen University, where he also directs the Medical Humanities program. In 2023, he began working with the American Red Cross of Western New York's Pride Alliance Resource Group. Blankschaen primarily works on applied ethical issues in social ontology and how marginalized communities access healthcare resources. He also has a growing research interest in sexual health ethics, especially within the LGBTQ community.

James J. Cordeiro, PhD, is a full professor at SUNY Brockport, where he has received SUNY Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence in both Teaching and Scholarship. He earned a B.Sc in Microbiology and Chemistry from the University of Bombay (St. Xavier’s College), an MBA from the University of Rochester, and a PhD in Management from University at Buffalo.

Chief, Eye Service, West Texas VA
Associate Director, Romanell Center
Clinical Ethics Consultant
Associate Clinical Professor, Texas Tech Univ.

James Delaney is a professor of philosophy and Rose Bente Lee-Ostapenko Endowed Director of Professional Ethics at Niagara University. His current research examines traditional questions in philosophy and how emerging technology in science and medicine affect the issues involved in them.

Neil Feit is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Fredonia. He has published two books and over 20 articles, most of which appear in leading international journals of philosophy. Feit’s interest in bioethics and related topics dates back to 2002, when he published a widely cited article on the badness of death. More recently, in a series of papers on the metaphysics and moral significance of harm, Feit has done work on several issues concerning the foundations of bioethics and the nature of disease.

Jack Freer, MD, is a retired clinical professor, and, the emeritus director of the Romanell Center. He was the course director of IDM 701 (the required medical students' clinical ethics course) for 30 years. Freer organized the Romanell Clinical and Research Ethics Seminars, as well as many other conferences and lecture series over the course of his career.

Information is forthcoming.

Information is forthcoming.

Robert Kelly received both his M.A. (2016) and Ph.D. (2021) in Philosophy from the University at Buffalo. His research has included work in experimental philosophy, cognitive science of religion, bioethics, philosophy of medicine, metaphysics, and applied ontology. Robert's dissertation ("Understanding Addiction") defended a dispositionalist account of the nature of addiction, argued that addiction research should incorporate the use of realist ontologies so as to remedy what he calls the 'disunification problem' abundant in the literature, and offered a start towards developing such an ontology of addiction. In addition to his association with the Romanell Center, Robert has worked as an ontology researcher with the National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR) Lab under Barry Smith. Included in his NCOR work were a DoD-funded ontology project through MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, as well as collaborations with Janna Hastings and Robert West on their development of the Behavior Change Intervention Ontology and its addiction-focused sub-ontology AddictO. As of Fall 2022, Robert is a Philosophy Instructor-Tenure Track (Assistant Professor equivalent) at Bakersfield College, one of his alma maters in his hometown of Bakersfield, California. 

Stephen Kershnar is a distinguished teaching professor in the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Fredonia and an attorney. He focuses on applied ethics and political philosophy. Kershnar has written on a number of topics in bioethics including abortion, affirmative action in medical schools, consent, Judeo-Christian bioethics, pedophilia, and quantifying health. Kershnar is the author of nine books, including Total Collapse: The Case Against Morality and Responsibility (2018) and Abortion, Hell, and Shooting Abortion-Doctors: Does the Pro-Life Worldview Make Sense? (2017). 

Peter Koch is a professor of philosophy at Villanova University in Philadelphia, PA. After receiving his PhD from SUNY Buffalo, he completed a Clinical Ethics Fellowship at the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Baylor College of Medicine. Peter has worked as a clinical ethics consultant at the V.A. Hospital of Western New York and Houston Methodist Hospital, where he has completed over 100 clinical ethics consultations. He has published on the metaphysics of death, informed consent, medical professionalism, reproductive ethics, and the ethics of intensive care. His current research interest is in theories of patient welfare and how these theories inform biomedical ethics.

Debra Kolodczak, PhD, is a multimedia artist, photographer, content developer, and AEM6 UX designer/editor. At the University at Buffalo, she teaches hybrid courses in graphic communication, visual literacy, and virtual media ethics. Her research interests involve the use of optical illusions.

Jelena Krgovic's research interests are primarily in philosophy of psychiatry, philosophy of medicine and existentialism. She holds a Ph.D in philosophy in 2016 from SUNY at Buffalo where she wrote her dissertation "Existential Psychoanalysis and the Nature of Mental Disorder”. In the dissertation she focuses on providing a new definition of mental illness — one that starts by understanding mental health, and takes into account phenomenological understanding of the person as a whole in order to delineate between disvalued behavior, human suffering and mental illness. Her approach to this problem draws on Sartre's philosophy, especially his existential psychoanalyses of Flaubert and Jean Genet. She is currently working on the significance and role of communication in mental disorder.

David Limbaugh's research focus is applied ontology. He works in the Department of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo as an Intelligence Community Postdoc funded by the Department of Energy through the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE). His other interests include philosophy of religion, philosophy of medicine, and metaphysics. He received his PhD in Philosophy from University at Buffalo in 2018. His dissertation is titled: Modality, Representation, and Powers. It develops a metaphysics of modality where modal truths like, "Humphrey could have won the election" are made true by primitive dispositional properties called `powers'. David also worked as an associate ethics consultant at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Buffalo during the 2015 and 2016 calendar years.

Timothy J. Madigan, Ph.D, is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, and the founder of its Irish Studies Program. Madigan’s areas of interest include Medical Ethics, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, and Popular Culture and Philosophy. He is the President of the Bertrand Russell Society and the former President of the Northeast Popular Culture Association. Madigan was the first editor of the Romanell Center’s “Bioethics Bulletin.”  

Yuichi Minemura's research interests are bioethics, metaphysics, and ontology. He examines how we begin to exist, persist, and cease to exist in virtue of the analysis of personal identity. In 2017, he earned a Ph.D. in the Department of Philosophy, SUNY University at Buffalo. The title of his dissertation is ‘A Metaphysical Analysis of the Contemporary Brain Death Controversies.’ Minemura has published several articles on the basis of the arguments discussed in each chapter of the dissertation. 

Catherine Nolan is currently working on issues in the intersection of metaphysics and bioethics. She is particularly interested in applying the concepts and arguments of the Christian metaphysical tradition to contemporary problems.  Her dissertation, entitled “The Ethics and Metaphysics of Vital Organ Donation,” was a defense of the claim that death is a metaphysical event, unable to be determined purely scientifically. This makes the diagnosis of death much more uncertain. If we attempt to justify vital organ donation by claiming that the donor is dead, we are often being misleading or dishonest. Instead, she suggests that we should focus on not killing the donor, treating those who may be dead as though they are still alive. 

Philip Reed, Ph.D., is a Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at Canisius College, where he works on ethics, applied ethics, and moral psychology. His primary research interests in bioethics are the doctrine of double effect and end of life issues. He is a member of the Home & Community Based Care, Palliative Care, & Ethics Committee for the Catholic Health System of Buffalo.

As an undergraduate, Barry Smith studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Oxford, before earning his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 1976. Currently, he holds the position of Julian Park Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science, and Neurology at the University of Buffalo in New York.

Adam Taylor, Ph.D., is a UB Philosophy alumnus, and has been a (full-time) lecturer in philosophy at North Dakota State University in Fargo since 2013. His research interests are primarily in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion with a healthy sideline in ethics and well-being.

Travis Timmerman is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at Seton Hall University. He completed his PhD in Philosophy at Syracuse University in May 2016. Before he was at Syracuse, he did his undergraduate work in philosophy and political science at Arizona State University. He also completed a master’s in political science at ASU with a focus on political theory and American politics. His research interests are in ethics, death, and epistemology.

Stephen Wear, Ph.D. is associate professor emeritus, and founding former co-director of the Center for Clinical Ethics and Humanities in Health Care at the University at Buffalo. He is the ethics officer at the Buffalo VA Medical Center where he leads the IntegratedEthics program. He had been responsible for the stewardship of the Patrick and Edna Romanell Fund for Bioethics Pedagogy since its inception. 

Wear's research interests span the range of clinical ethics, but is particularly focused on informed consent. He is the author of many articles and book chapters on various topics as well as a book on informed consent. He has been the primary source for medical ethics education at the University at Buffalo for more than three decades.​

Neil Williams is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, and Department Chair.  His work is in the metaphysics of science (causal powers especially)  and includes publications in the nature and classification of disease.