Tia Powell

Tia Powell is an American psychiatrist and bioethicist. She is Director of the Montefiore-Einstein Center for Bioethics and of the Einstein Cardozo Master of Science in Bioethics Program, as well as a Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Clinical Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in The Bronx, New York. She holds the Trachtenberg Chair in Bioethics and is Professor of Epidemiology, Division of Bioethics, and Psychiatry. She was director of Clinical Ethics at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City from 1992-1998, and executive director of the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law from 2004-2008.

Powell graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe College and Yale Medical School.

Powell has served on a number of committees for the Institute of Medicine, especially focusing on ethical issues in the management of public health disasters. She worked with the Institute of Medicine on 5 separate projects related to public health disasters, including as co-chair of the IOM report on antibiotics for anthrax attack. She has bioethics expertise in public policy, dementia, consultation, end of life care, decision-making capacity, bioethics education and the ethics of public health disasters.

As executive director of the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, Powell initiated development of guidelines for the allocation of ventilators in New York State, in the event of a crisis. With Guthrie S. Birkhead, Powell co-chaired a 2007 workgroup that developed draft guidelines for New York State for the allocation of ventilators in the event of an influenza pandemic. This became the foundation for New York State's 2015 Ventilator Allocation Guidelines.

Dementia Reimagined
In 2019, Powell published Dementia Reimagined: Building a Life of Joy and Dignity from Beginning to End through Penguin Random House. Dementia Reimagined combines medicine and memoir, discussing both the history of dementia and Alzheimer's disease and the emotional and ethical issues involved in dealing with it in an elderly family member. One of the historical figures she discusses is Solomon Fuller, a black doctor whose research at the turn of the twentieth century anticipated important aspects of current medical knowledge about dementia.