Bio sketch

 

Kelsey is faculty at the Center for Bioethics and Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she is also Associate Faculty Director of the Master of Bioethics Degree Program and Co-Director of the Master of Bioethics Degree Virtual Program.

As a health policy researcher and ethicist, Kelsey employs empirical and normative methods to analyze health policy and support progress toward ethical systems of health and health care.

The majority of her work focuses on the intersections of health and justice. Special emphases include the ethics of rationing scarce health resources, the distribution of responsibility for health and social determinants of health (SDOH), effective models for managing ethical questions in healthcare payer and delivery organizations, and policy approaches to support the health of vulnerable populations. Her PhD (health policy & ethics, Harvard University) examined the role of social factors in determining patient admittance to organ transplantation and substance use disorder treatment systems, using qualitative and quasi-experimental methods to describe how health actors allocate access and arguing for fairer approaches through the lens of distributive and procedural justice theory. Her current research focuses on the role that health plans, healthcare delivery systems, and pharmaceutical manufacturers play in carrying forward health justice, including mechanisms for doing so and the ethics of pursuing equity in addition to other worthy goals.

In tandem with her research, Kelsey educates future leaders in bioethics through her leadership of and teaching in the Master of Bioethics program at Harvard Medical School. She also consults to health organizations about the values associated with particular decisions or activities for which they are responsible and methods for making hard choices in the face of conflicting values.

Throughout her research, teaching, and service, Kelsey is dedicated to developing practices that will enable all of us to acknowledge what we owe to one another in our shared systems of health and health care.