Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities & Bioethics
. Health Law, Medical Ethics, Reproductive Justice, Performance in Medicine
. Katie Watson is an Assistant Professor in the Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program of Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and she serves as member of the Northwestern Memorial Hospital Ethics Committee. In 2007 Ms. Watson received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence, and in 2008 she received the Gender Equity Award. At various times she has been the Unit Director for the M1 Ethics and Values, M2 Profession of Medicine, and M3 Ethical Legal and Social Issues in Medicine courses. Ms. Watson has developed and taught a required “legal literacy” sequence for M3s, and two courses for the MH&B Masters program: “Bioethics and the Law” and “The Practice of Bioethics.” On occasion she teaches as guest faculty for the Northwestern obstetrics residency program, the Political Science Department, and Loyola's Stritch School of Medicine’s Ethics Consultation Intensive. Ms. Watson has an extensive background in creative writing and performance, and she remains active in Chicago’s theater and literary communities. She draws on this experience in her role as creator and Editor of the MH&B Program's Report Atrium, as well as in teaching her occasional humanities seminars "Playing Doctor: Improvisational Theater for Doctor/Patient Communication" and "Gallows Humor in Medicine." Ms. Watson is an adjunct faculty member at the training center of Chicago's Second City theatre, she was an Artist in Residence at the Ragdale Foundation in 2003, 2006, and 2007, and in 2003 Crain's Chicago Business selected her as one of their "40 Under 40" for her combined work in law, medicine, and art. Before coming to Northwestern, Ms. Watson was a public interest lawyer. She graduated from Indiana University (BA Political Science 1989), and New York University School of Law (cum laude 1992), where she held the Hays Fellowship in Reproductive Freedom and was a senior editor of the Review of Law and Social Change. She began her career as a law clerk in federal court for the Chief Judge of the Western District of Michigan, then worked as an appellate public defender for death row inmates in California, focusing on field investigation and expert psychiatric and social work testimony on physical and sexual child abuse, substance abuse, and mental illness as mitigation issues in sentencing. Along the way, she also worked as a childbirth assistant (doula) in San Francisco and Chicago and did a brief stint at a contraceptive clinic for prostitutes in Nairobi funded by the Centre for Education, Development and Population Activities (CEDPA). Ms. Watson moved to Chicago in 1997 to work at the Legal Assistance Foundation representing impoverished clients in matters of domestic violence, child custody, racial discrimination, sexual harassment, and public housing. Ms. Watson completed fellowships in clinical medical ethics at the University of Chicago Medical School's MacLean Center (1999), and medical ethics and humanities at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine (2001). During and after those fellowships she was a part-time associate in the health law department of the Chicago law firm McGuireWoods, where she represented clients such as Planned Parenthood and dialysis providers for several years. Though Ms. Watson no longer represents clients, certain types of advocacy flow naturally from her work as an academic. For example, she contributed to an amicus brief in the Supreme Court regarding “partial-birth” abortion, she recently authored a bioethicists’ amicus brief in an involuntary sterilization case and she currently sits on an Equip for Equality working group drafting legislation on this issue, and she has served on the Advisory Committee of the Illinois Campaign for Responsible Sex Ed and its “blue ribbon” curricula review panel.
. 312/503-1675
k-watson@northwestern.edu
750 North Lake Shore Drive, Room 636 | |
