معرفی
Anna Westermair, MD, PhD, serves as a Senior Research Assistant in the Biomedical Ethics team at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Board certified in psychosomatic medicine, psychotherapy, psycho-oncology, and palliative care, she brings extensive clinical experience from University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein (Germany) and University Hospital Basel.
Her academic foundation spans medical and psychological training at the University of Heidelberg (Germany), Paris Descartes University (France), and FernUniversität in Hagen (Germany). She recently completed her PhD in Biomedical Ethics with a dissertation examining ethical challenges in anorexia nervosa care, specifically addressing futility and end-of-life decision-making.
Westermair's research pioneers the integration of palliative care principles into severe mental illness management, with specialized focus on anorexia nervosa. She investigates critical ethical tensions between autonomy, beneficence, and non-maleficence in treatment-refractory cases, developing frameworks for goals-of-care discussions and futility assessments. Current projects include a Delphi study on normative justifications for palliative psychiatry and cross-cultural analyses of compulsory interventions.
Analysis of her 2022-2025 publications reveals dominant themes in palliative psychiatry implementation and biomedical ethics methodology. Her work systematically addresses gaps in end-of-life care for eating disorders, advances principle-oriented clinical ethics consultation models (notably the Basel 2.0 framework), and establishes cross-cultural consensus on psychiatric palliative approaches through international collaborations with India and Switzerland.
No scientific awards were documented in the source materials.
Westermair actively contributes to the University of Basel's Biomedical Ethics team through clinical ethics consultations and research leadership. She directs three key initiatives: an expert-therapist interview study on prognostic goals for anorexia nervosa, a Delphi consensus project on futility conceptualization, and epidemiological research on severe mental illness prevalence in palliative care populations.
