Frances Rieth Maynard is an associate professor in the School of Nursing at Rutgers University with a dual appointment in the Department of Family Medicine at New Jersey Medical School.  She is a board-certified family nurse practitioner with a PhD, MSN, and MBE and has focused her scholarship on bioethics and nursing, with special interest in family decision making and informed consent. Her work has been published in the Hastings Center Report and the American Journal of Bioethics. She is a member of the Rutgers University Institutional Review Board and is co-chair of the Ethics committee at University Hospital, Newark.