Cornell Law School Professor Larry Palmer, a nationally renowned expert on health policy and law, will join the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law in Louisville, Ky., in January 2003. Palmer, who has been a Cornell faculty member for 27 years, served as Cornell vice president for academic programs and campus affairs from 1987 to 1994 and as vice provost from 1979 to 1984.

The institute is a collaboration between the University of Louisville School of Medicine and Brandeis School of Law. Housed at the University of Louisville, it was launched in 2001 to foster research, teaching and service in bioethics, health sciences, public health and law.

Palmer, who also will assume the endowed chair in urban health policy at University of Louisville, will teach, conduct research and lead policy development on urban health issues in his new position. Concerns he'll focus on include racial and ethnic health disparities, access to health care, health care finance, public health, the health care needs of vulnerable populations and other areas where medicine, law and policy intersect.

"Larry Palmer is one of the country's most respected scholars in health law and policy. He will be a wonderful addition to the institute faculty," said institute director Mark Rothstein.

"I am honored to join a group that continually makes important contributions to bioethics and the development of health policy nationally and internationally," Palmer said. "The institute is a model of how interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching and public service should be done."

Palmer received his B.A. from Harvard and his LL.B. from Yale Law School. He is the author of Endings and Beginnings :Law, Medicine and Society in Assisted Life and Death (Praeger, 2000); Law, Medicine, and Social Justice (John Knox, 1989); and articles dealing with law, medicine and health policy. Palmer also is the executive producer of, and author of the study guide to, the educational video "Susceptible to Kindness: Miss Evers'

Boys and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study." The video, which features scenes from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated play "Miss Evers' Boys," by Cornell Professor David Feldshuh, is used in medical ethics classes at various medical schools. Palmer is a member of the American Bar Association's Bioethics and the Law Coordinating Committee and has been a director of the National Patient Safety Foundation since 1997.