Dr. Chesla is Professor and Vice Chair for Academic Personnel, Department of Family Health Care Nursing, UCSF School of Nursing.

The goals of the Thelma Shobe Chair in Ethics and Spirituality are to identify the spiritual dimensions of nursing practice, and to provide leadership in addressing the ethical and spiritual challenges raised by technological advances in health care. Dr. Sulmasy, in the Second Annual Shobe Lecture defined spirituality broadly: "The primary spiritual questions are these: questions of meaning, questions of value and questions of relationships."

Dr. Chesla's work aligns with the goals of the Shobe Chair through her enduring commitment to explore and illuminate how families, through their relationships and caring practices heal and hold the person who is ill. Her work is directed at articulating, and helping others articulate, the practical ethical comportment of patients and families in the face of chronic illness, and the ways in which health care services and structures support or impede their ways of coping with everyday challenges.

Details about Dr. Chesla's current work and publications can be found at: http://nurseweb.ucsf.edu/www/ffchesk.htm

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.

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 1997/98 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.

Anne Hughes is an advanced practice nurse in palliative care at Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center, part of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. She also serves as volunteer Associate Clinical Professor in Nursing in the Department of Physiological Nursing, UCSF. Anne received her M.N. from the University of Washington in Seattle as family nurse practitioner and as nurse specialist caring for patients and their families living with a progressive illness. Dr Hughes' dissertation, completed at UCSF, explored the meaning and experience of dignity of the urban poor living with advanced cancer and advanced HIV/AIDS.

In the course of understanding the everyday experiences of seriously ill persons living at the margins of society, many described the role of faith in coping and in connecting them to something greater than the struggle of living.

Rev. 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.