Director

Throughout his career, ethics concerns have always been at the core of Dr. Bard’s many efforts. During his rabbinic training years, he was often sent to a variety of settings to highlight ethical issues in business, healthcare, and leadership in religious institutions.

Bard retired from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (in 2009) where he had directed the Department of Pastoral Care and Education from 1984 while continuing a similar directorship at Massachusetts Mental Health Center until 1996. He continues forty plus years as a clinical psychologist in the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He created the Beth Israel Hospital’s (Boston) Ethics Advisory Group (1985), one of the first formal ethics review processes in Boston at that time, and he wrote a book (Medical Ethics in Practice) documenting the formation and work of this group. He was also an early member and lecturer at PRIMR.

In those early years he helped others to create over 30 ethics programs at hospitals and other settings in the United States and abroad. Dr. Bard was invited to initiate and direct the Research Subject Safety Office at the General Clinical Research Center (NIH) at BIDMC. He has served on many IRBs, (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, (24 years), Harvard Medical School (20+ years), the Bedford Stem Cell Research Foundation (7+ years), Veritas Solutions, Inc. (now iHope Inc.), (10+years) and has chaired several Data and Safety Monitoring Committees and Boards.

While directing the Department of Pastoral Care at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, he also served on the Harvard School of Public Health’s IRB as a component of his long interest in ethics and human research. Bard served two terms on the Board of the Massachusetts Society of Medical Research, Inc. Dr. Bard is a long-standing member of Harvard’s Program in Psychiatry and the Law (PIPATL), a think-tank focused on many issues inherent in forensic psychiatry with a special interest on ethical issues relating to this field.