About the founder
Dr. Piroska Kopar, originally from Hungary, has earned her undergraduate degree in philosophy and history of science at the Great Books Program of St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. She received a Robert W. Woodruff Scholarship to attend Emory University’s School of Medicine in Atlanta, GA, earning her MD in 2007. Dr. Kopar trained in general surgery and cardiac surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, followed by clinical fellowships in trauma and acute care surgery at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, CT. During her research years in residency, Dr. Kopar was first an academic, then a research fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Division of Medical Ethics. Her research focused on developing ethics education for residents, a direction she further pursued as a Fellow of the Association for Surgical Education.
To better understand the intersection of medicine, ethics, and economics, she enrolled in the Executive Masters of Business Administration Program at Olin School of Business at Washington University in Saint Louis, earning her MBA in 2023.
Dr. Kopar has been faculty at Washington University’s School of Medicine in Saint Louis since 2018, where she directs the Department of Surgery’s Center for Humanism and Ethics in Surgical Specialties (CHESS) and leads the Medical School’s ethics curriculum. She frequently reviews medical ethics articles, has given numerous talks on the topic of ethics in healthcare, and publishes on core clinical and public health ethical questions. Dr. Kopar founded EthiLine in 2021 to increase universal access to high quality ethics consultations that promote value-aligned care.