Associate Professor of Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University, J.D., Ph.D.
olickr@upstate.eduRobert S. Olick, J.D., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Bioethics and Humanities. He earned his law degree at Duke University and his doctorate in philosophy and bioethics at Georgetown University and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Before joining the Center in 2001, he taught in the Colleges of Medicine and Law at the University of Iowa, and served as Executive Director of the New Jersey Bioethics Commission where he was involved in the crafting of public policy, reports and educational initiatives on a range of bioethical issues, in particular advance directives for health care, determination of death and decisions near the end of life, ethics committees and assisted reproductive technologies.
Dr. Olick chairs the University Hospital Ethics Committee and serves on its Ethics Consultation Service. He is Managing Editor of the Center’s Bioethics in Brief newsletter.
Dr. Olick teaches bioethics for both first and third-year medical students and for allied health professional students, and directs the Responsible Conduct of Scientific Research course required for all graduate students. He directed the Ethical, Legal and Social Issues in Medicine (ELSIM, which was replaced with Excellence in Care in 2015) component of the Practice of Medicine course, required for all first-year medical students from 2001-2014. He has also taught courses on medical professionalism, decisions near the end of life, and Bioethics and the Law, and Genetics, Disability and Law through the Consortium for Culture and Medicine.
Dr. Olick’s research interests include decisions near the end of life, medical futility, physician-assisted suicide, the physician-patient relationship, informed consent, adolescent decision making, the limits of confidentiality, genomic medicine, reprogenetics, genetic privacy and discrimination, and research with adults with intellectual disability.
He is the author of Taking Advance Directives Seriously: Prospective Autonomy and Decisions Near the End of Life(Georgetown Univ. Press, 2001, 2004) and the co-author (with Robert Weir) of The Stored Tissue Issue: Biomedical Research, Ethics, and Law in the Era of Molecular Genetics (Oxford Univ. Press, 2004).