Tarris (Terry) Rosell, PhD, DMin, HEC-C
As Rosemary Flanigan Chair at the Center and contractually on behalf of the Center, Dr. Rosell does bioethics education and consultation at Kansas City University (KCU) and the University of Kansas Medical Center (Clinical Professor, School of Medicine). He is also, for many years, a Professor of Pastoral Theology (Ethics and Ministry Praxis) at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Shawnee, Kansas.
Dr. Rosell completed a fellowship in clinical ethics at Vanderbilt University and earned his PhD there in Ethics and Society from the graduate department of religion. His first doctorate is in Pastoral Theology from Colgate-Rochester Divinity School.
From 2006-10, he served as co-director of Sabbaths of Hope, a grant-funded project with Mental Health America of the Heartland, which empowers faith leaders to address the stigma of depression and inequitable access to treatment. He concurrently directed another disparities initiative ultimately incorporated as MetroCARE, a referral network of volunteer healthcare providers for low-income uninsured persons.
Dr. Rosell provides ethics consultation for the University of Kansas Health System, where he co-chairs the Hospital Ethics Committee and directs the Ethics Consultation Service. He also directs the Clendening Summer Fellowship program for the School of Medicine.
He lectures widely, especially in the Greater Kansas City area and throughout the Midwest. He has also taught and lectured internationally, most recently in the Philippines (2009-2010), Kenya (2011), and Myanmar (2014-2017). He traveled twice to Myanmar in 2016 on an ARCUS grant addressing ethics issues of sexuality and gender in church and society. He was in rural Laos in 2017, and continues to work with medical mission colleagues there on possibilities for improving pain management, palliative and hospice care options in that developing nation.
Dr. Rosell’s ethics articles are found in numerous periodicals, both print and electronic. He contributed a chapter to the 2008 Cambridge University publication, Complex Ethics Consultation: Cases that Haunt Us, and another to a 2011 publication by Johns Hopkins University Press, Controversial Bodies, on the ethics of plastinated bodies exhibition. Another book chapter on a clinical ethics case is forthcoming.
Dr. Rosell lives in the Kansas City area with his life partner, the Reverend Dr. Ruth Rosell. They have four adult children and two sons-in-law. When not engaged in ethics work, Terry makes pottery at a clay studio, both for art’s sake and for three orphaned kids in Kenya to whom all pottery proceeds are directed. He also enjoys working on a long-term rehab project on a rural Kansas lake property—to which he hopes someday to retire with Ruth, and there to live the life of a grandfather-artist.