Stephen Wood
Visiting Researcher
Stephen P. Wood is joining the Petrie-Flom Center as a Visiting Researcher in 2020. Stephen is an acute care nurse practitioner practicing emergency medicine in Boston. He will complete a three-year appointment as a fellow at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School in 2020 and is a Harvard Macy Scholar.
Stephen’s interests are diverse and include ethical aspects of the opioid epidemic, human trafficking, immigration, and asylum as well as disaster ethics, moral injury, and burnout. He is faculty with the Harvard Asylum Clinic and the co-advisor for the Harvard Medical School bioethics student interest group. Stephen’s prior professional experience included seventeen years in emergency medical services, ten of which were as a critical care flight paramedic. He holds a Masters in Toxicology and worked as a criminalist in the forensic toxicology division with the New Hampshire State Police. He was also the associate director for the BIDMC Fellowship in Disaster Medicine and a faculty and fellow for the nursing fellowship in disaster medicine. He is an instructor at Northeastern University at the Bouvè College of Health Sciences and the co-advisor for the Students for Health Justice organization, a student group dedicated to enhancing curriculum around marginalized populations.
Stephen is an active blogger for the Petrie-Flom Center’s Bill of Health and has contributed content on opioids, HIPAA, prescription monitoring programs, human trafficking, immigration and climate change. He contributed several chapters for the premier textbook on disaster medicine including topics on the use of social media in disasters. He has contributed content to several ethics and professional journals spanning the topics of human trafficking, opioids, and disaster ethics. He has developed unique experiential programs for health care providers to explore moral injury and burnout, including an aquarium-based project that utilizes analogy and parallels to marine biology. Stephen’s work at the Petrie-Flom Center will focus on opioids, immigration, and disaster ethics.