Kristina Orfali
Kristina Orfali is a Professor of Bioethics in Pediatrics at Columbia Medical Center, as well as a clinical ethicist and a member of the NY Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital Clinical Ethics Committee.Trained in France at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, she holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Before joining CUMC she has been an Assistant Professor in Medicine and Associate Director at the MacLean Center for Clinical Ethics at the University of Chicago and a Research Scholar at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) at Columbia.
Her research and publications span a variety of ethical issues. She has published work in a cross-cultural perspective on patient's hospital experiences, on clinician and family decision-making and on neonatal ethics. Her more recent work focuses on ethical dilemmas, subjective risk assessment and international variations in neonatal prognosis with a particular emphasis on the links between decision theory and empirical results. Another line of research, pursued with colleagues form behavioral sciences, relates to the negative psychological consequences of choice in life and death contexts; the paper “Tragic Choices: Autonomy and Emotional Responses to Medical Decisions”, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, received this journal’s 2012 Her most recent work is at the intersection of law, medicine and bioethics. Kristina Orfali has published articles in Social Science & Medicine, Sociology of Health & Illness, Journal of Clinical Ethics, American Journal of Bioethics and others, and has co-edited several books. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Columbia Maison Française, of the International Academic Network on Bioethics (IANB), and of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Master Program Law, Economics and Bioethics at University of La Sapienza in Rome, Italy. She is the co-director of the course on Clinical Pediatrics Ethics for medical students.