Work in the Peter Terry Lab deals primarily with ethical questions surrounding patientsÕ end-of-life care and decision making. We explore topics such as family involvement in health care decision making, informed consent in clinical medicine and effectiveness of palliative support care. Our team has investigated the development and validation of a family decision-making self-efficacy scale. Our research has also included exploring the ethics around the allocation of lifesaving resources during a disaster.

The Veit Stuphorn Laboratory studies the neurophysiological mechanisms that underlie decision making and self-control. We record the activity of single neurons in awake animals that are engaged in decision-making processes. This allows us to identify the types of signals that neurons in specific parts of the brain represent and the computations they carry out. We also study human subjects in the same tasks with the help of fMRI. These parallel experiments provide comparative information about decision processes in human and non-human primates.

Research in the Alison E. Turnbull Lab focuses on patient-clinician interactions. We study decision-making processes for ICU patients and their families and focus on the long-term outcomes of ICU survivors. Additional research examines ways to improve end-of-life care for patients.

The Lana Lee Lab works to create successful patient-centered care strategies for young individuals living with HIV. We focus in particular on decision making in HIV treatment for youth and on the availability of services for young people living with HIV in the United States and Uganda.

Work in the Sarah Clever Lab focuses on medical education, patient-provider communication and the role of shared decision-making in patient recovery. We recently examined the ethical dilemmas of caring for “influential” patients whose attributes and characteristics (for example, social status, occupation, or position), coupled with their behavior, have the potential to significantly affect a clinician's judgment or actions.

Research in the Caleb Alexander Lab examines prescription drug use. This includes studies of population-based patterns and determinants of pharmaceutical use, clinical decision-making about prescription drugs, and the effect of changes in regulatory and payment policies on pharmaceutical utilization. We have special expertise in conducting survey-based studies and analyzing secondary data sources, including administrative claims, the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey.

The goals of the Vikram Chib Lab are to understand how the nervous system organizes the control of movement and how incentives motivate our behaviors. To better understand neurobiological control, our researchers are seeking to understand how motivational cues drive our motor actions. We use an interdisciplinary approach that combines robotics with the fields of neuroscience and economics to examine neuroeconomics and decision making, motion and force control, haptics and motor learning, image-guided surgery and soft-tissue mechanics.

Research in the James Fackler Lab explores the operational side of the hospital environment, seeking ways to optimize patient care and physician decision-making. Our work includes building a mathematical model of how patients move throughout a hospital, which we believe will help hospitals better predict the influx of emergency cases and therefore optimize resource preparation and scheduling of elective procedures. We also research data acquisition and data mining in the operating room and intensive care unit, with a goal of identifying patterns and trends.

The research mission of the Zackary Berger Lab is to bridge evidence-based medicine and shared decision-making in the context of patient-centered care. Lab studies investigate how to accomplish this in the common case of uncertainty, while seeking to clarify the ethics of decision-making and empirically describe how shared decision-making is and should be done. Zackary Berger, MD, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In addition to his work as an internist and primary care physician, Dr. Berger is an associate faculty member in the Berman Institute of Bioethics, and core faculty in the Evidence Based Practice Center as well as the Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research.

Research in the Cynthia Boyd Lab concentrates on the clinical care of comorbid chronically ill and frail older adults, both chronically and during acute illnesses. Current projects focus on the treatment burden among older adults with multimorbidity, the importance of competing risks in decision-making for the elderly, the effects of guided care on the quality of care and the improvement of clinical practice guidelines for the elderly.