Arthur R. Derse, MD, JD, is Director of Medical and Legal Affairs, and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Bioethics, and is Clinical Professor of Bioethics and Emergency Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

His primary educational activities include direction of the medical school's medical ethics course and several graduate school courses encompassing law, ethics education, ethics consultation and clinical bioethics.

He is Senior Consultant for Academic Affairs at the American Medical Association's Institute for Ethics. He contributed to the Institute for Ethics' development of the Education for Physicians on End.of.life Care (EPEC) curriculum, and serves as faculty in national presentations of the curriculum under the sponsorship of Northwestern University School of Medicine.

He is a member of the board of directors of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH), the 1600-member academic organization of medical school and university bioethicists and humanities educators. He is a member of the editorial boards of the American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB), the Cambridge Dictionary of Bioethics, and the journal, Clinical Medicine & Research.

He is chair of the Veterans Health Administration's National Ethics Committee and a member of the Ethics Committee of the American College of Emergency Physicians, of which he is former chair. He is chair of the Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital Ethics Committee, co-chair of the Milwaukee Veterans Affairs Medical Center Ethics Committee, and an ethics committee consultant at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin.

He is the founder and moderator of the Medical College of Wisconsin.s Bioethics Discussion Forum, a nationally recognized academic Internet discussion group dedicated to bioethical issues, and directs the Bioethics Online Service, an internet-based bioethics information resource.

His publication and research has focused on emergency medicine and ethics, confidentiality, informed consent, end-of-life decision making, the doctor-patient relationship and the use of the internet in academic bioethics and medicine.

He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Medical School and a 1987 graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School, cum laude. He completed a fellowship in medical education at the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1993.