Our Investigators

Margaret Plews-Ogan, MD, MS
Principal Investigator

Associate Professor of Medicine
Department of Medicine
Division of General, Geriatric, Palliative and Hospital Medicine
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Dr. Plews-Ogan holds an undergraduate degree in philosophy and was a Rockefeller Fellow in Theology at Yale University Divinity School. She received her M.D. degree from Harvard University and completed her residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Dr. Plews-Ogan has expertise in patient safety and medical errors, and integrative medicine including mindfulness. She is Director of the UVA Center for Appreciative Practice, a positive culture transformation initiative across the Schools of Medicine and Nursing, the Medical Center, and the Health Services Foundation physician group practice.

Justine Owens, PhD
Co-Principal Investigator

Associate Professor of Research
Department of Medicine
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Dr. Owens is a cognitive psychologist with a focus on the interaction of emotion, cognition, memory and narrative studies. She received her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University and completed post-doctoral studies in the Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Owens has expertise in personality assessment including recent advancements in positive psychology and spirituality; integrative medicine; content analysis; research design; and data analysis. Dr. Owens has studied the life transformations associated with Near-Death Experience (NDE) and the effects of medical condition on NDE reports, published in the Lancet. Most recently, she has conducted studies of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and massage for pain management, and MBSR for heart palpitations (in collaboration with University of Virginia cardiologists). She has investigated use of many complementary and alternative therapies while Research Director of the Center for Complementary and Alternative Therapies at UVA (funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine for study of CAM for pain management).

Natalie May, PhD
Co-Investigator

Associate Professor of Research
Department of Medicine
Division of General, Geriatric, Palliative and Hospital Medicine
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Dr. May holds a Bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College, an M.A. from Boston University, and a Ph.D. from the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. She has extensive grant writing, program development, qualitative research and program evaluation experience. Dr. May is currently a faculty member in the UVA Center for Appreciative Practice and co-author of the book Appreciative Inquiry in Healthcare: Positive Questions to Bring Out the Best.

Martha Brown Menard, PhD, CMT
Consultant

Dr. Menard is a research scientist, author and educator. Much of her clinical work over 25 years has focused on pain management, and her research interests have focused on complementary and alternative therapies for symptom management. She received her Ph.D. in education and M.Ed. in clinical psychology from the University of Virginia. Dr. Menard is currently the principal of Sigma Applied Research, a consulting firm providing research design, data analysis, and program evaluation services. She is the author of Making Sense of Research, a textbook on research literacy for healthcare professionals.

David Morris, PhD
Co-Investigator

Professor, Emeritus
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Dr. Morris is recently retired as University Professor at the University of Virginia, where he held appointments in English and Medicine. He has written two prize-winning books on British literature—including Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (1984), which won the annual award for best book by the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies—and The Culture of Pain (1991), which won a PEN prize. He has subsequently lectured and written widely in the field of pain medicine—including chapters in Evidence-Based Chronic Pain Management (2010) and in Bonica’s Management of Pain (4th ed). His work in pain has expanded to include a broader interest in so-called biocultural studies, which he explores further in three texts: Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (1998); Narrative, Pain, and Suffering (2005), co-edited with pain specialists Daniel Carr and John Loeser; and in “Unforgetting Asclepius: An Erotics of Illness,” in New Literary History (2007). The entire summer 2007 issue of New Literary History, co-edited with Lennard J. Davis (founder of disability studies), focuses on the possibilities of thinking about biocultures.

Daniel Becker, MD, MPH, MFA
Significant Contributor

Tussi and John Kluge Professor of Palliative Medicine
Department of Medicine
Division of General, Geriatric, Palliative and Hospital Medicine
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Dr. Becker is a nationally-recognized physician-writer and current Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Virginia. He also edits Hospital Drive magazine and practices and teaches primary care internal medicine.

Monika Ardelt, PhD
Collaborator

Associate Professor of Sociology
2008 Colonel Allan R. and Margaret G. Crow Term Professor
Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL

Dr. Ardelt is a 1999 Brookdale National Fellow and a 2005 Positive Psychology Templeton Senior Fellow. She is a Founding Faculty Member and Member of the Advisory Committee of the Center for Spirituality and Health at the University of Florida. Dr. Ardelt received her Diplom (M.A.) in Sociology from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University of Frankfurt/Main in Germany and her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on successful human development across the life course with particular emphasis on the relations between wisdom, religion, spirituality, aging well, and dying well.

Lawrence Calhoun, PhD
Collaborator

Professor
Department of Psychology
University of North Carolina
Charlotte, NC

Dr. Calhoun is a Licensed Psychologist. Although his parents were North American, he was born and raised in Brazil. He is co-author/co-editor of eight books and more than 100 articles published in professional journals. He teaches undergraduate and graduate students, and is a recipient of the Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence and of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. Dr. Calhoun received the B.A. from St. Andrews College, the M. A. from Xavier University, and the Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. For many years his scholarly work has been focused on the responses of persons encountering major life crises, particularly the phenomenon of posttraumatic growth. His wife, Mary Lynne, is Dean of the College of Education at UNC Charlotte. They have two daughters, Eliza, a social worker in Brooklyn, NY, and Mary Laura, a prekindergarten teacher in the Washington, D.C. Public Schools.

Thomas Gallagher, MD
Collaborator

Associate Professor of Medicine
Department of Medicine
Division of General Internal Medicine
Department of Bioethics & Humanities
University of Washington

Dr. Gallagher completed his M.D. at Harvard University, a residency in Internal Medicine at Barnes Hospital, Washington University, St. Louis, and a fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of California at San Francisco. He is a practicing general internist and conducts research and is widely published in the areas of ethical and communication issues in conflicts of interest, research ethics, and the disclosure of medical errors and adverse events.