Jay Baruch, MD is Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Alpert Medical School at Brown University, where he serves as the director of the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Scholarly Concentration. As an undergraduate, he studied English at Union College in Schenectady, NY. He received his medical degree at the Stony Brook School of Medicine, where he took a year leave to write a truly terrible novel. He did his emergency medicine residency training at what is now the Christiana Care Health System in Delaware and later completed the Medical Ethics Fellowship at Harvard Medical School. He considers himself amazed and lucky to do academic work that centers on the importance of creative thinking, creative writing skills and the arts in clinical medicine. Present projects include the Rhode Island Arts and Humanities group on practice, policy and research; a free online Brown EdX course, “Beyond Medical Histories: Gaining Insight From Patient Stories,” on the importance of creativity and story skills as important clinical skills, especially when facing uncertainty; working with Rhode Island School of Design Museum educators to create museum-based curriculum to get clinicians to think about how they think. He is a former Faculty Fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. He’s the director of the Creative Medicine Series, a speaker series co-sponsored by the Cogut Institute and the Brown Department of Emergency Medicine. He’s served as a Director-at-Large, American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and the former medical humanities section chair for the American College of Emergency Physicians, where he co-led the development and implementation of an online medical humanities platform for the specialty. He’s the author of two award-winning short fiction collections, What's Left Out (Kent State University Press, 2015), and Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (Kent State University Press, 2007) His short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous print and online medical and literary journals as well as lay media outlets that include the Boston Globe, STATnews, Cognoscenti, KevinMD and others.