DAVID L. COULTER, M.D.

Dr. David Coulter, Senior Staff Neurologist, Associate Professor of Neurology (retired), Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.

Dr. Coulter retired from Boston Children’s Hospital in 2023, where he was a senior staff neurologist and associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. He had previously been the chief of child neurology at Boston City Hospital. His professional career focused primarily on neurodevelopmental disabilities, especially epilepsy and intellectual disability (ID). He wrote the first report of benign neonatal sleep myoclonus in 1982. He served as President of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD) in 2004-5 and coauthored the current definition of ID. He also served on the Multi-Society Task Force that defined the medical aspects of the persistent vegetative state. He completed fellowships in bioethics and in hospital chaplaincy and served for many years on various ethics committees. He wrote the chapter on ethics in child neurology for three editions of Swaiman’s Pediatric Neurology: Principles and Practice. He co-edited the Journal of Religion, Disability and Health from 1999-2010. Dr. Coulter received the national Humanism in Medicine Award from the U.S. Child Neurology Society in 2017 and the national Dybwad Humanitarian Award from AAIDD in 2019. In 2021 ICNA published the book, Namaste: Humanism in Child Neurology, which Dr. Coulter co-edited with Dr. Alcy Torres. Dr. Coulter has written poems all of his life and has published six books of poems on a variety of topics. He will read some of his poems and describe his poetic journey during his presentation today.