Spirituality is defined broadly and as deeply human search for meaning in life. What matters to us most; what we are concerned about, sustains our everyday ways of being in the world and our relationship with others; as such, it is connected to meanings and spirituality. For some this self-understanding and sense of meaning is lodged in religious traditions, for others it can be lodged in the sense of freedom and mastery associated with science and problem-solving for others, it may be related to individual or communal spiritual practices.

-Patricia Benner

Dr. Betty Davies is Professor, Department of Family Health Care Nursing, University of California San Francisco. Dr. Davies has gained international recognition for her work in this field through numerous publications, including two books (Fading Away: The experience of transition in families with terminal illness and Shadows in the Sun: Experiences of sibling bereavement in childhood) and through her leadership in helping to establish North America's first free-standing children's hospice in Vancouver, Canada.
Dr. Davies' current research focuses on two federally funded studies from the National Institutes of Health to examine the experiences of Chinese and Latino families in pediatric palliative care and another project to explore the experiences of fathers of seriously ill children.

Dr. Davies is actively involved in several organizations pertaining to pediatric end of life care, including having served as Co-Chair of the Executive Committee of ChiPPS (Children's Hospice and Palliative Care Services), under the auspices of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, and on the Advisory Board of ELNEC (End of Life Education for Nurses - Pediatric Palliative Care).

Susan Folkman, Ph.D., is Professor of Medicine, the Osher Foundation Distinguished Professor of Integrative Medicine, and the Director of the University of California-San Francisco Osher Center for Integrative Medicine. Dr. Folkman received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1979, where she remained until coming to UCSF in 1988.
She is internationally recognized for her theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of psychological stress and coping. Her work over the past 17 years has been funded by the NIH and has focused on stress and coping in the context of chronic illness and especially on issues having to do with caregiving and bereavement. Her more recent research focuses on mind-body approaches to care.

Dr. Folkman served on the NIH/NIMH National Advisory Mental Health Council. She has chaired or been a member of various NIH study sections, served on Institute of Medicine and NIH workgroups, and was co-chair of the American Psychological Association task force on ethics in research with human participants. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society.

Jodi Halpern is an Associate Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a psychiatrist with a doctorate in philosophy whose career focus has been on moral psychology and the ethics of health relationships. During a post-doctoral Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Fellowship at UCLA she also expanded this work to address related issues of social justice, and she teaches in this area at the School of Public Health. During 1997/1998 she was a Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University. Halpern uses philosophical methods to analyze ethical concepts at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, such as empathy and aspects of personal autonomy, as in her book From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice, (Oxford University Press, New York, 2001). Her recent papers focus on how emotional and social factors impede empathy and autonomy. She currently has a Greenwall Faculty Fellowship to study the role of the emotional imagination in health care decisions about unfamiliar future health states.

Dr. McPhee has been on the faculty of the Division of General Internal Medicine (DGIM), Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco since 1980. He is currently Professor of Medicine. Since 1999, he has been an Attending Physician on the UCSF Palliative Care Consultation Service. Between 1996-2001, Dr. McPhee served as Co-Convener of Provider Education Committee of the Last Acts: Death and Dying in America Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In addition to his primary research activity in cancer prevention and control, Dr. McPhee has conducted research in end-of-life care. He has previously collaborated on research projects to promote end-of-life care content in the 50 best-selling medical textbooks, and to evaluate a hospice type multidisciplinary intervention among chronically ill outpatients. He is currently a core faculty member for one of the 6 national Palliative Care Leadership Centers, training hospitals in how to establish palliative care consultation services or units. Since 2000, Dr. McPhee and his colleagues at UCSF have coordinated a bimonthly series in the Journal of the American Medical Association, entitled "Perspectives on Care at the Close of Life," which has published more than two dozen articles on issues in palliative care and end-of-life care.

Reverend Dr. Michele R. Shields, Director of Spiritual Care at UCSF Medical Center, is affiliated with the United Methodist Church and has been an ordained minister since 1981.
Michele holds a B.A. degree from McGill University in Montreal, a M.Div. degree from Boston University, and a D.Min. degree from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. She is a certified supervisor with the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education and a board certified chaplain with the Association of Professional Chaplains.
Michele served as a local church minister for ten years and later served five hospitals prior to UCSF.

She is currently a member of the UCSF Medical Center.

Thelma Shobe Cook, benefactress of the Thelma Shobe Endowed Chair and Thelma Shobe Endowed Lectureship in Ethics and Spirituality, graduated from St. Luke's Hospital School of Nursing, San Francisco, in 1951. Upon graduation, she entered the baccalaureate program at the UC School of Nursing on the Berkeley Campus, obtaining her B.S. degree in August 1952. Following the completion of the sixteen-week supervised field study in January 1953, she obtained her Public Health Nursing Certificate after which she worked the next twenty-five years as a Public Health Nurse, first with Alameda County Health Department and then with Oakland Unified Schools. On a leave of absence, she obtained her MPH at UC School of Public Health in 1964. She retired in 1979 to pursue her own spiritual quest among other interests.