D Micah Hester, PhD, MA

Dr. Hester earned a BA in Philosophy from Pomona College in Claremont, California and an MA and PhD in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Dr. Hester serves as co-course director of the medical students’ Practice of Medicine course, the physician assistant students’ ethics course, as well as the ethics in genetic counseling course. Along, with other Department faculty, he provides clinical ethics consultations at both UAMS and ACH and helps serve the research ethics consult service for the UAMS Translational Research Institute.

He also serves on numerous committees both locally and nationally, and produces scholarly research in bioethical/philosophical areas.
Dr. Hester has published nine books and numerous journal articles. He has written extensively on the ethics of patient-professional relationships (Community As Healing [Rowman & Littlefield, 2001]) and end-of-life issues (End-of-life Care and Pragmatic Decision Making [Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010]). As an editor and chapter author, he also has concentrated on the education of ethics committee membership in two books: Guidance for Ethics Committees (Cambridge University Press 2012) and Ethics By Committee (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Trained in philosophy with a focus on American pragmatism, Dr. Hester has volumes on the work of William James (On James [Wadsworth, 2004], co-authored w/Robert Talisse), John Dewey, and William Earnest Hocking. Some of Dr. Hester’s publications can be found in leading bioethics journals, such as the American Journal of Bioethics, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and the Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. He also is regularly invited to give talks on bioethical topics throughout Arkansas, the Mid-South, nationally, and internationally.

Dr. Hester coordinates the Pediatric Ethics Consortium which is a national professional initiative to promote pediatric ethics scholarship and education.