Dr. Carter is an academic neonatologist and clinician-educator who has practiced for 30 years. He graduated with honors from David Lipscomb College in Nashville, TN in 1979 and the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Memphis with honors in 1983.

Having received a Health Professions Scholarship from the US Army to attend medical school, he subsequently took his pediatric residency at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center outside of Denver, CO and practiced general pediatrics for one year at Fort Bragg, NC before returning to Denver to take his fellowship in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine from the University of Colorado, graduating in 1990. He is board certified in both General Pediatrics and Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine.

Dr. Carter’s scholarly pursuits have long included bioethics and palliative care. He served as a Medical Company Commander in the 1991 Gulf War and received the Bronze Star for meritorious service. He has served on Ethics Committees and conducted ethics consults at every duty station. After leaving the Army, Dr. Carter served on the faculty of the Medical College of Georgia, where he directed activities in regionalized neonatal-perinatal outreach education and contributed to a four-year longitudinal ethics curriculum. In 1999, he joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and continued his clinical practice focused on providing intensive care to critically ill newborns, consulting in the NICU Follow-up Clinics, and initiating a new service in Pediatric Palliative Care. He continues to study NICU outcomes, participating as a Site-Principal Investigator for the NICHD-funded Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes – Neurobehavioral Outcomes of Very Preterm Infants study. His work in neonatology and bioethics brought him to initiate efforts in neonatal-perinatal palliative care over 18 years ago. With Dr. Marcia Levetown, he co-edited and contributed to the first textbook on pediatric palliative care, Palliative Care for Infants, Children & Adolescents, in 2004. In 2003 he received the National Hospice & Palliative Care Organization’s Research Award, and in 2008 he gave the William A. Silverman Lecture in Ethics at the Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting.

Dr. Carter continues to lecture, teach and publish (over 100 articles and 35 book chapters), advocate for pediatric palliative care, and mentor graduate students, residents and fellows. He enjoys serving as Co-Director for the Children’s Mercy’s Certificate in Pediatric Bioethics and working with medical students as the Sirridge Endowed Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, School of Medicine.