Faculty

Pediatric Ethics Fellowship

Program Director

Fellowship Coordinator

Current Fellow

Ellen Keyser Endelman, MDiv, BCC

Ellen is an ordained minister, board certified chaplain, and passionate champion of the power of imagination. She obtained her degree in theatre arts and art history from Simpson College. She obtained her Master of Divinity from Chicago Theological Seminary, placing an emphasis in her studies on interfaith chaplaincy and trauma informed care. Ellen completed her Chaplaincy internship at Unity Point Methodist and Blank Children's Hospital continuing to focus on pediatrics and trauma informed care. She then completed residency at Kansas University Hospitals and Clinics, focusing on de-escalation and conflict resolution. Ellen's work has explored the use of imagination and shared narrative creation as medium for connectivity, agency, and mutual understanding. Ellen's background in theatre and work as an interfaith chaplain has led to her to engage with imaginative play, storytelling, and theatre as a way of helping children deal with serious illness, grief, and hospitalization. Ellen's own experiences growing up with a physical disability and chronic illness have shaped her approach to pediatric care from a patient's perspective. Ellen's current research is focused on the impact and importance of preventative and embedded ethics in pediatric intensive care, and the architecture of moral spaces made possible by the intersection of chaplaincy and ethics in this context. Ellen is also engaged in uplifting and including Amish, Mennonite, and other Plain cultural perspectives and voices in medical decision making. She continues to be interested in a variety of philosophical and theological topics, including the ethics of word choice in medical communication, the sophisticated moral worlds of children, and the use of imaginative play in healing.

Recent Fellows

Candyce Greene, MD, MPH, MSW, HEC-C
Pediatric Palliative Medicine Physician, Penn State Health Children’s Hospital, Hershey, PA

Candyce Greene completed the Children’s Mercy Pediatric Ethics Fellowship Program in June 2025. An experienced palliative care physician, Dr. Greene previously completed fellowships in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at UCLA, Pediatric Pain & Palliative Care at Children’s Clinics and Hospitals of Minnesota, and Hospice & Palliative Medicine at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Currently, Dr. Greene is a pediatric palliative medicine physician at Penn State Health Children’s Hospital in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Yoo Sun (Sunny) Jeong, RN, BScN, MBE
Doctoral Student in Nursing, University of Toronto

Sunny Jeong completed the Children’s Mercy Pediatric Ethics Fellowship Program in June 2024. During her undergraduate training for her BScN at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Sunny contributed to various research projects on orthopedic 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 graduated from the Master of Bioethics program at Harvard Medical School. 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 interest is in pediatric disability ethics, pediatric informed consent and assent, and everyday ethics. Sunny continues her training in nursing and bioethics as a doctoral student at the University of Toronto. Sunny has been published in the International Journal of Orthopaedic and Trauma Nursing, Children, and the McGill Journal of Medicine.

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, she has an interest in the impact of spiritual identity on medical and illness narratives. Currently, Dr. Hood-Patterson 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
Director of Ethics, 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 Health Humanities and Bioethics, University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry, Rochester, NY

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 University of Rochester, where she teaches courses in bioethics and health humanities and also directs the Advanced Certificate Program in Clinical Bioethics. 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
Ramón y Cajal Fellow, Department of Philosophy and Society, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

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. Dr. Murano 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.