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Faculty

Pediatric Ethics Fellowship

Program Director

Jeremy Garrett, PhD

 

Associate Program Director

Stephanie Kukora, MD

Fellowship Coordinator

Toni Zaner, BA

Current Fellow (2023-2024)

Yoo Sun (Sunny) Jeong, RN, BScN, MBE

Sunny Jeong received her BScN from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. During her undergraduate education, Sunny contributed to various research projects on orthopaedic and neuromuscular conditions in pediatric populations at the Shriners Hospital for Children®-Canada. After obtaining her nursing degree, Sunny worked as a Pediatric Registered Nurse and as a Strengths-Based Nursing and Healthcare Coordinator at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto. Sunny recently graduated from the Master of Bioethics program under Harvard Medical School, where she completed her final Capstone Project in “Optimizing the Pediatric Anesthesia Informed Consent Process”. Her interest in bioethics stems from her experiences working with children with disabilities and her desire to improve the care of this population. Sunny’s area of interests is in pediatric disability ethics, pediatric informed consent and assent, and everyday ethics. Sunny has published in the International Journal of Orthopaedic and Trauma Nursing and the McGill Journal of Medicine. 

 

Recent Fellows 


R. Dawn Hood-Patterson, PhD, MDiv, HEC-C
Clinical Ethicist, Children’s Health, Dallas, TX

Dawn Hood-Patterson completed the Children’s Mercy Pediatric Ethics Fellowship Program in June 2023. Dr. Hood-Patterson is trained in theology and began her career in spiritual care and chaplaincy. Straddling the landscape between theology and ethics, Dr. Hood-Patterson has an interest in the impact of spiritual identity on medical and illness narratives. Currently Dawn is a clinical ethicist at Children’s Health in Dallas where her professional obligations involve ethics consultation and institutional ethics. Dawn has written for the Canadian Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling, and Journal of Pediatric Ethics.

Ian Wolfe, PhD, MA, HEC-C
Senior Clinical Ethicist, Clinical Ethics Department, Children’s Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

Ian Wolfe completed the Children’s Mercy Pediatric Ethics Fellowship Program in June 2020 following a decade of experience as a critical care nurse (mostly as a PICU charge nurse). Dr. Wolfe's interests center around complexity and interaction in health care, specifically how interactions between individuals, systems and social structures affect clinical ethics and patient care. This interest has informed his work from his dissertation on intractable conflict around futility in pediatric critical care, his MA thesis on health equity and the impact of health-legal partnerships, as well his published work in journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Pediatrics, Nursing Ethics, Journal of Perinatology, Advances in Nursing Science, and Clinical Therapeutics. Dr. Wolfe is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Pediatric Ethics, an in-print journal dedicated to ethical issues in pediatric healthcare. Dr. Wolfe is also a member of the ethics advisory board for the American Nurses Association (ANA) Center for Ethics and Human Rights, as well as an expert panelist for the ANA Code of Ethics Revision. In his role at Children's Minnesota, Dr. Wolfe oversees the clinical ethics department, the clinical ethics consultation service, and preventative and organizational ethics. 

Bryanna Moore, PhD, HEC-C
Assistant Professor, Department of Bioethics and Health Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX

Bryanna Moore completed the Children’s Mercy Pediatric Ethics Fellowship Program in June 2019. Her fellowship project explored disagreements between doctors and parents that involve parent-initiated media campaigns aimed at generating public support for controversial treatment requests and refusals and resulted in publications in Pediatrics and Bioethics. Following her fellowship year at Children’s Mercy, Dr. Moore completed an additional postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in 2021. She is currently an Assistant Professor at UTMB, where she serves as a clinical ethicist within the hospital system and director of UTMB’s Clinical Ethics Fellowship. In her current role, Dr. Moore also teaches graduate students in bioethics and health humanities and continues her research. Additionally, Dr. Moore has served as the Chair of the Pediatric Ethics Affinity Group for the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities since 2022. She is interested in a broad range of topics in moral philosophy and bioethics, but is particularly interested in clinical ethics, virtue ethics, end-of-life decision-making and the philosophy of emotion.


Maria Cristina Murano, PhD
Senior Researcher, Clinical Pharmacology Department. Clinical Trials Unit. Hospital La Paz Institute for Health Research - IdiPAZ (La Paz University Hospital - Autonomous University of Madrid)

Associate Researcher, Science, Philosophy and History (SPHERE) Research Unit (French National Center for Scientific Research, CNRS - Paris Cité University)

Maria Cristina Murano completed the Children’s Mercy Pediatric Ethics Fellowship Program in June 2019. Her fellowship project investigated the use of growth hormone treatment for children who are shorter than average without having any growth-related disorders. She is particularly interested in how ethical issues intertwine with cultural and social aspects and she combines philosophical with empirical qualitative research methods. Her research interests include philosophy of medicine, bioethics, phenomenology of embodiment, disability studies, science and technology studies, feminist studies and medical humanities. 

Our Pediatric Ethics Fellowship team

Jeremy Garrett, PhD
Program Director
(816) 731-7073
jgarrett@cmh.edu

Stephanie Kukora, MD
Associate Program Director
816-731-7111
skukora@cmh.edu 

Toni Zaner, BA
Fellowship Coordinator
tmzaner@cmh.edu

Jennifer Pearl
Office Manager
(816) 731-7154
jepearl@cmh.edu