|  Professor of Medical Humanities & Bioethics and of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
Disability ethics, reproductive health care for people with disabilities, health disparities and access issues (particularly for people with disabilities)
Kristi L. Kirschner, MD is a professor of clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics, and also holds a secondary appointment in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Feinberg School of Medicine. Her focus is on disability ethics, specifically concepts of disability in medical decision-making, health care professional curricula on disability, and health care access issues and disparities. She is particularly interested in how concepts of disability and quality of life affect medical decision making, the reconstitution of identity in the context of disability and cultural representations of disability in the arts. She is a graduate of Carleton College and the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. She completed her residency in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in 1990 at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), through the McGaw Medical Center at Northwestern University, subsequently staying on at RIC as an attending physician at RIC. In 1995 after completing fellowship training at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago, she was awarded the Coleman Foundation Chair in Rehabilitation Medicine by RIC to support her work in creating a program in disability ethics, as well as to support her work in disabled women's reproductive health care services. During her tenure at RIC she was the founder and director of the Donnelley Family Disability Ethics Program and the co-founder and Medical Director of the RIC Women with Disabilities Program.
Since January 2010 her clinical work has been based at Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital on the westside of Chicago. She specializes in the care of patients with neurological disabilities and has a focused interest in adult spina bifida, neuromuscular diseases and cerebral palsy.
Dr. Kirschner teaches at all levels of the Northwestern medical curriculum, in graduate and continuing medical education programs, and in the Northwestern genetic counseling program. She is also working with colleagues at Sinai/Schwab on the challenges of providing comprehensive care to people with disabilities in an inner urban, resource-stressed health setting serving largely minority populations.
750 N. Lake Shore Drive, Room 623
Rubloff Building
Chicago, IL 60611 k-kirschner@northwestern.edu | |
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