Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA	Postdoctoral Fellowship	07/2021	Bioethics
Harvard University, Boston, MA	Ph.D.	11/2019	Health Policy and Ethics
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ	BA	05/2010	Philosophy, Neuroscience, Dance

Kelsey N Berry, Ph.D., 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.

Special emphases of her work include the ethics of health priority setting and allocating limited health resources in domestic and global settings, the distribution of responsibility for health with particular attention to social determinants of health, effective models for managing ethical and values-based questions in health care payer and delivery systems, and policy approaches to support health justice and particularly the health of vulnerable populations. Areas of policy focus have included domestic health care reform, mental health and substance use disorder policy, and solid organ transplantation policy.

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.

In tandem with her research, Kelsey educates future practitioners 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.

• Ethics, Health Care
• Bioethics
• Health Policy
• Health Services Research
• Health Care Systems