Lucia Tanassi (PhD 2002) is a medical anthropologist, bioethicist and clinical social worker who has worked on the ethics of the ends of life for more than a decade.  She trained in medical anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and completed a Bioethics Fellowship with the Program in Medicine and Human Values.  Her work has focused on agency, personhood and the relationships and meanings produced in therapeutic encounters—beginning with her fieldwork on routine episiotomy in Italy, to her work in palliative care, organ donation policy, plastination, and ethical dilemmas in critical care.  She has published her research on episiotomy in the Journal of Social Science and Medicine, and her writings on plastination appear in the American Journal of Bioethics and the American Journal of Public Health. She is currently writing up her research on ethical dilemmas in critical care, and developing new projects on end-of-life decision making for patients with psychiatric diagnoses.