The mission of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine (CBSSM) is to improve the practice of medicine by supporting a vibrant interdisciplinary community that provides clinical ethics, research ethics, and ethics education services and creates leading empirical bioethics, decision science, and health communications research.

CBSSM has five main goals in pursuit of its mission:

• The goal of the clinical ethics service is to serve as a national model for how to instill a culture of ethical and patient-centered care in a large academic medical center.
• The goal of the research ethics service is to improve the conduct of health research to fully respect participants, benefit diverse communities, and improve access to evidence-based care.
• The goal of the ethics education service is to provide classroom and bedside instruction in theoretical and applied clinical and research ethics to students, trainees, and interprofessional health care team members to train excellent health care professionals and researchers and positively impact patient care.
• The goal of CBSSM’s empirical bioethics, decision science, and health communications research is to apply cutting-edge legal and social science methods both to understand all types of medical decision-making processes at individual, clinical, and policy levels and to design and rigorously evaluate ways to improve them.
• The goal of CBSSM’s vibrant community is to offer opportunities for intellectual interactions, organizational knowledge, staff support, and institutional and external connections to facilitate achieving these goals.