Medical Center Hour/Brodie Medical Education Lecture

Title: What are the Humanities in Medical Education For?

Speaker: Rebecca Volpe, PhD, HEC-C, Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at Penn State College of Medicine, and Director of the Clinical Ethics Consult Service in the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. She obtained her doctorate from Saint Louis University’s Center for Health Care Ethics and completed a clinical ethics fellowship at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Since joining Penn State in 2010, she has designed and led many courses related to bioethics and health humanities, served on College and Department curriculum oversight committees, and been the recipient of numerous teaching awards.

In addition to her teaching and clinical responsibilities, Dr. Volpe maintains an active research agenda. Her empirical research is currently primarily focused on medical education, in particular on the outcomes of health humanities curriculum at schools of medicine. Other areas of current or recent inquiry include an exploration of the experience of professional identity formation for underrepresented in medicine students; defining quality standards for a clinical ethics consultation (as opposed to quality for a clinical ethics consultant); and a theoretical exploration of the purpose of sabbatical – is it for research productivity or rejuvenation, and can it be both? She lives in idyllic Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, with her husband, two children, a dog named Zealand (named by her geography-obsessed tween) and a cat named Chicken Nugget (named by her chicken nugget-obsessed preschooler).

Filed Under: Events