10th Anniversary Event and Alumni Celebration

Registration is Open

Students, fellows, alumni, faculty, staff and community members are invited to join us as we celebrate 10 years as the Center for Bioethics!

Join us for this special event on campus that honors our rich history and bright future. We look forward to rekindling old connections, forging new friendships, and celebrating the successes of our esteemed alumni. Activities will include networking opportunities, lightning talks and poster sessions by alumni, a guided campus tour, receptions — and a keynote address by Emmy award-winning television writer, producer, and pediatrician Neal Baer, MD, MA, MEd.

Most of the activities will be inside the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at 77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, MA 02115. There will be an optional soirée at The Liberty Hotel at 215 Charles Street, Boston, MA 02114. View the schedule of events further below for details. All times are in Eastern Time. All events are in person. There are no hybrid, virtual or live-streamed events.

About the Keynote Speaker

Neal Baer, MD, MA, MEd is an award-winning showrunner, television writer/producer, physician, author and a public health advocate and expert.

Dr. Baer most recently was Executive Producer and Showrunner for the third season of Designated Survivor, starring Kiefer Sutherland. Previously, he was Executive Producer and Showrunner for the hit CBS television series Under The Dome, the CBS medical drama A Gifted Man, as well as the Executive Producer of the hit NBC television series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit from 2000-2011, where he oversaw all aspects of producing and writing the show, with a budget of $100 million. During his tenure on SVU, among the awards the series won include the Shine Award, People’s Choice Award, the Prism Award, Edgar Award, Sentinel for Health Award, and the Media Access Award. Actors on the show won six Emmys and the Golden Globe. The series regularly appeared among the top ten television dramas in national ratings and is now the longest-running prime time US tv drama in history.

Prior to his work on SVU, Dr. Baer was Executive Producer of the NBC series ER. A member of the show’s original staff and a writer and producer on the series for seven seasons, he was nominated for five Emmys as a producer. He also received Emmy nominations for Outstanding Writing in A Drama Series for the episodes Hell and High Water and Whose Appy Now? For the latter, he also received a Writers' Guild of America nomination. Among the multiple awards the series garnered include the People’s Choice Award, the Peabody Award, and an Emmy for best drama series.

Dr. Baer’s other television work includes "Warriors," an episode of China Beach, nominated for a Writers' Guild Award for best episodic drama, and the ABC Afterschool Special Private Affairs, which he wrote and directed. The Association of Women in Film and Television selected the program, dealing with sexually transmitted diseases, as the Best Children’s Drama of the Year. He wrote The Doctor Corps, a feature film for Twentieth Century Fox; Outreach, a pilot for the WB Network, which he also produced; The Edge, a medical series pilot for CBS; and The Beast, a medical series pilot for NBC, which was redeveloped in 2017 by Twentieth Century Fox Television. Dr. Baer’s first novel, Kill Switch, co-written with Jonathan Greene, was published in January 2012, and his second novel, Kill Again, also with Jonathan Greene, was published in 2015. 

In January 2020, Dr. Baer attended the Sundance Film Festival, where the film he executive produced, Welcome to Chechnya, won a Special Jury Award. The film was screened at the Berlin Film Festival and won the Teddy Award for outstanding film on LGBTQ issues. The documentary premiered on HBO in June 2020 and won the Peabody Award.

Dr. Baer graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed his internship in Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital, Los Angeles. He received the Jerry L. Pettis Memorial Scholarship from the American Medical Association as the most outstanding medical student who has contributed to promoting a better understanding of medicine in the media. The American Association for the Advancement of Science selected him as a Mass Media Fellow in 1982. 

Dr. Baer's primary medical interests are in adolescent medicine and global health. He has written extensively for teens on health issues for Scholastic Magazine, covering such topics as teen pregnancy, AIDS, drug and alcohol abuse, and nutrition. Dr. Baer taught elementary school in Denver, Colorado and also worked as a research associate at USC Medical School, where he focused on drug and alcohol abuse prevention. Dr. Baer co-established the Institute for Photographic Empowerment at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications, which links photographic story-telling projects around the world and makes that work available to NGOs and policymakers. He has worked in South Africa and Mozambique, teaching photography to mothers with HIV and AIDS and orphans whose parents died of AIDS so that they can tell the world their own stories. Dr. Baer also produced the documentary short, Home Is Where You Find It, directed by Alcides Soares, a seventeen-year-old Mozambican orphan, which chronicles one young man’s search to find a family after his parents have died of AIDS. The film has screened internationally at sixty festivals and has won four awards for best documentary.

Dr. Baer previously was an Adjunct Professor of Community Health at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, where he led a Freshman Seminar on Soda Politics. He was a Clinical Professor of Preventive Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California and established The Global Media Center for Social Impact at ULCA’s Fielding School of Public Health, where he worked on projects using new media to promote global health. Since 2017, Dr. Baer has been a Lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he created and co-directs the MS degree program in media, medicine, and health, the first graduate degree program of its kind. He also created and co-directs the Certificate Program in Media and Medicine, an online program running since 2019, for health care advocates and practitioners to tell stories to improve health and wellness.

Dr. Baer graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in Political Science from Colorado College. He holds masters' degrees from Harvard Graduate School of Education and from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Sociology. Before working in television, he spent a year at the American Film Institute as a directing fellow. In 2000, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colorado College. In May 2018, he gave the Harvard Medical School commencement speech entitled “What Matters?"

Dr. Baer has served on the boards of many organizations related to health care, including the Venice Family Clinic (the largest free clinic in the U.S.; 2000-2010) and RAND Health (2000-2011). He was a trustee of the Writers Guild of America Health and Pension Fund (2000-2012), was a trustee of the American Film Institute, served as a trustee of Colorado College from 2006-2016. He also served as an elected member to Harvard University’s alumni board (2006-2011) and was Co-Chair of the CDC and Gates Foundation-supported, Hollywood, Health and Society. Dr. Baer serves on the Board of Fellows at Harvard Medical School. He also served on the board of the One Archives and is a member of the editorial board of Perspectives in Biology Medicine, for which he recently edited a special issue on CRISPR, that won the MLA Award for best special issue aimed at a generalist audience.

This past July, Johns Hopkins University Press published The Promise and Peril of CRISPR, which Dr. Baer edited. He also wrote the commentary for the book, which has been a best-seller on Amazon.