Cornell Law School Professor Larry Palmer, a nationally renowned expert on health policy and law, will join the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law in Louisville, Ky., in January 2003. Palmer, who has been a Cornell faculty member for 27 years, served as Cornell vice president for academic programs and campus affairs from 1987 to 1994 and as vice provost from 1979 to 1984.
The institute he joins is a collaboration between the University of Louisville School of Medicine and Brandeis School of Law. Housed at the University of Louisville, it was launched in 2001 to conduct interdisciplinary research, teaching and service in bioethics, health sciences, public health and law.
Palmer, who also will assume the endowed chair in urban health policy at the University of Louisville, will teach, conduct research and lead policy development on urban health issues in his new position. Concerns he'll focus on include racial and ethnic health disparities, access to health care, health care finance, public health, the health care needs of vulnerable populations and other areas where medicine, law and policy intersect.
"Larry Palmer is one of the country's most respected scholars in health law and policy. He will be a wonderful addition to the institute faculty," said institute director Mark Rothstein.
"I am honored to join a group of colleagues who continuously make important contributions to bioethics and the development of health policy at both the national and international level," Palmer said. "The collaborative manner in which the institute operates is a model of how interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching and public service should be done."
Peter W. Martin, the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law and former dean of Cornell Law School, said of Palmer's new appointment and his Cornell career: "The University of Louisville could not have found a better person for this challenging new position. Larry is a dedicated and caring teacher, a scholar whose work consistently presses past disciplinary boundaries, an institutional citizen beyond compare. For nearly three decades Cornell has benefited from his ideas, values, enthusiasm and steadfast commitment. It's hard to imagine the university without him."
And Goldwin Smith Professor Davydd Greenwood, director of the Institute for European Studies, who worked with Palmer on a range of academic initiatives during his Day Hall stint, said of him: "I know it sounds corny, but Larry has been a kind of academic superhero, always there, always ready to try to increase the space for intellectual excitement." As examples of new programs Palmer supported and helped bring into being, Greenwood cited the biology and society major in the Program for Science, Technology and Society; the Common Learning program, to increase undergraduate educational collaborations between colleges; and the building of a humanities component into Weill-Cornell Medical College's curriculum.
Palmer received his B.A. from Harvard and his LL.B. from Yale Law School. He is the author of Endings and Beginnings: Law, Medicine and Society in Assisted Life and Death (Praeger, 2000), Law, Medicine, and Social Justice (John Knox, 1989) and articles dealing with law, medicine and health policy. Palmer also is the executive producer of, and author of the study guide to, the educational video "Susceptible to Kindness: Miss Evers' Boys and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study." The video, which features scenes from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated play "Miss Evers' Boys," by Cornell Professor David Feldshuh, is used in medical ethics classes at various medical schools. Palmer is a member of the American Bar Association's Bioethics and the Law Coordinating Committee. He has been a director of the National Patient Safety Foundation since 1997.
The Law School honored Palmer at a special farewell event Dec. 3.
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