D. Micah Hester is Division Chief of the Division of Medical Humanities and  Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Pediatrics at UAMS, as well as clinical ethicist at Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH).  Dr. Hester’s duties at UAMS include course director of the sophomore medical students’ medical ethics, co-director of the research ethics consult service (for the CCTR), numerous committee memberships, and scholarly research in bioethical/philosophical areas.  At ACH he serves as an ethics educator/consultant.  He also remains active in local, regional, and national professional activities.

Dr. Hester has published eight books and dozens of journal articles (click here for an abbreviated list).  His latest book is End-of-life Care and Pragmatic Decision Making (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010) which develops ethical insights in the care of dying patients based on pragmatic radical empiricism.   He is editor of Ethics By Committee (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), a textbook for the education of members of hospital ethics committees, and author of Community As Healing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) which develops a pragmatist ethic for physician-patient relationship.  A co-authored (w/Robert Talisse) book, On James (Wadsworth, 2004), explains the philosophical aspects of the thought of the pragmatist William James.  He has also edited volumes in computer ethics, the logic of John Dewey, and the idealism of William Earnest Hocking.  Some of Dr. Hester’s publications can be found in leading bioethics journals, such as the American Journal of Bioethics, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and the Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics.  He also is regularly invited to give talks on bioethical topics throughout Arkansas, the Mid-South, and the United States.

Dr. Hester coordinates the Pediatric Ethics Consortium  which is a national professional initiative to promote pediatric ethics scholarship and education.