Deborah Kasman

Faculty, Language and Thinking Program

Biography: Deborah Kasman (M.D., University of North Carolina; M.A., University of Washington) is a family physician. She completed her M.D. at the University of North Carolina in 1985 and her residency in Family Medicine at the University of Washington in 1988. For the next 11 years she cared for patients from conception to grave, including outpatient care, inpatient care, obstetrics and adolescent medicine, working in a mixed socio-economic clinic in Seattle Washington. She worked as a volunteer attending due her joy teaching residents. Searching for a deeper area of inquiry, she found her passion in the study of bioethics. She returned to University of Washington in 1999 to complete a Masters in Bioethics at the University of Washington and complete a Primary Care Research Fellowship at the Veterans Healthcare Administration Hospital in Seattle where she studied the emotions of physicians in training. She moved to Washington D.C. to complete a bioethics fellowship and join the faculty at Georgetown University where she worked with her mentor Dr. Edmund Pellegrino. Her academic pursuits expanded into ethical issues in the physician-patient relationship, as well as a philosophical analysis of the ethics of uncertainty in medicine. Teaching medical students and nursing students bioethics was one of her greatest joys of university life. She returned to clinical medicine in Seattle for family reasons while raising her two children. Missing bioethics, she moved to Southern California to work with a forthcoming group of scholars working to integrate bioethics into the daily practice of healthcare at a large healthcare organization – Kaiser Permanente. Returning to bioethics also meant an opportunity to explore questions close to daily healthcare such as how to address hope with grave diagnoses; how to determine when treatment is non-beneficial; and how to promote moral courage and decrease moral distress in healthcare workers. She is really looking forward to teaching incoming Bard students. She loves young minds and assisting students to develop critical thinking and expressing ideas in their unique voice. In her non-work life, Deborah loves being a mother, hiking with her dog, writing poetry and painting.
Website: https://languageandthinking.bard.edu
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