Cultural Issues in End-of-Life Decision Making

About the Author

Dr. Kathryn L. Braun is Professor and Chair of the DrPH Program in the Department of Public Health Sciences. She has a joint appointment with the School of Social Work, where she serves as Co-Investigator of the National Resource Center for Native Hawaiian Elders. She is affiliated with the UH Center on Aging, through which she serves as evaluator for the Hawai‘i Healthy Aging Partnership, dedicated to building capacity to deliver evidence-based health promotion programs for older adults. She also is Research Director of ‘Imi Hale -- Native Hawaiian Cancer Network, which is funded through a grant to Papa Ola Lo¯kahi (a Native Hawaiian Health organization) from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). In this role, she mentors Native Hawaiians who want to expand their skills in research, grant writing, and publishing. Dr. Braun’s primary teaching responsibilities are in the doctoral program, teaching seminars on health disparities and evidence-based public health. She is known for her work in community-based participatory research in cancer and gerontology, and she has published more than 125 peer-reviewed journal articles on these topics. She is a fellow in the Gerontological Society of America and the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education. She also consults as a trainer and program evaluator in Hawai‘i. Dr. Braun is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer, having served in the Philippines (Bontoc) in the 1970s. In 2008, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Busan, Korea. She is the 2009-2011 President of the Active Aging Consortium Asia Pacific, an international network of gerontologists in Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Singapore, and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. She likes to travel and has visited all 7 continents and more than 110 countries.James H. Pietsch joined the law school after first having served on active duty in the US Army Medical Service Corps and the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and subsequently serving as the directing attorney of the Honolulu Elder Law Unit of the Legal Aid Society of Hawai′i. At the law school he teaches Law, Aging and Medicine, Elder Law Clinic, Advanced Elder Law Clinic, and Health Law: Bioethics. He also holds a joint appointment at the John A. Burns School of Medicine where he specializes in issues at the intersection of law, aging, medicine, bioethics and psychiatry. Professor Pietsch serves as the law school Pro Bono faculty advisor, and supervises the University of Hawai′i Elder Law Program (UHELP). UHELP provides year-round direct legal services at the law school to socially and economically needy older persons. Professor Pietsch is a recipient of the Paul Lichterman Award for outstanding achievement in the advancement of legal services for older persons. In 2007 Professor Pietsch volunteered to serve as a Special Advisor to the Law and Order Task Force of the Multi-National Force-Iraq and subsequently served as a Rule of Law Advisor to the U.S. Embassy Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team and Kurdistan Regional Reconstruction Team in Iraq. More recently he served as a consultant for a US Pacific Command Rule of Law project in Timor Leste and a USAID-sponsored Access to Justice project back in Iraq. His Rule of Law work continues in Hawai′i as the faculty adviser to the law school’s Hammurabi Legal Forum.