Pitt Law Professor Awarded the Pellegrino Medal

PITTSBURGH—Alan Meisel, University of Pittsburgh professor of law and psychiatry and the Dickie, McCamey & Chilcote Professor of Bioethics, received the Pellegrino Medal "for contributions to American healthcare ethics and law in the selfless spirit of Edmund D. Pellegrino," from Samford University in Birmingham, Ala.

Samford established the Pellegrino Medal in 2001 to honor Pellegrino, noted Georgetown University bioethicist who has been called the father of the American bioethics movement, and to recognize individuals known nationally as leaders for their contributions to healthcare ethics.

Meisel, a leading national and international authority on end-of-life decision making, is the author of the two-volume treatise The Right to Die: The Law of End-of-Life Decision Making (Aspen Law and Business, 2004), now in its third edition. The first edition won the 1989 Association of American Publishers Award for the outstanding book in the legal practice category. Meisel has published widely in the fields of health law and medical ethics in numerous medical, legal, and ethical journals.

Meisel served on the Ethics Working Group of the White House Task Force on Health Care Reform in 1993. He was assistant director for legal studies on the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine in 1982, where he helped draft the commission's studies on informed consent and on end-of-life decision making. A fellow of the Hastings Center, Meisel has served as a consultant to the congressional Office of Technology Assessment on its studies of life-sustaining technologies and on institutional protocols for health care decision making. He is the founder and director of Pitt's Center for Bioethics and Health Law and the director of the law school's Health Law Program and the Master of Studies in Law Program.

Meisel holds the Bachelor of Arts degree and the J.D. from Yale University.

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