Biography

Dr. Diane E. Meier is Director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), a national organization devoted to increasing the number and quality of palliative care programs in the United States. She is also Director of the Lilian and Benjamin Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute; Professor of Geriatrics and Internal Medicine; and Catherine Gaisman Professor of Medical Ethics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, where she has served on the faculty since 1983.

Dr. Meier is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Institute on Aging Academic Career Leadership Award, the Open Society Institute Faculty Scholar’s Award of the Project on Death in America, the Alexander Richman Commemorative Award for Humanism in Medicine, the Founders Award of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization 2007, AARP’s 50th Anniversary Social Impact Award 2008, Gold Humanism Honor Society National Honoree 2008, Castle Connelly’s Physician of the Year Award 2009 and the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine Lifetime Achievement Award 2009. She is the recipient of a five-year NIA Academic Career Leadership Award, and she is Principal Investigator of an NCI-funded five-year multisite study on the outcomes of hospital palliative care services in cancer patients. Meier is also a recipient of the 2008 MacArthur Fellowship ― a $500,000, no-strings-attached grant for individuals who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the promise to do more. She is currently working with the Senate HELP committee as a 2009-2010 Health and Aging Policy Fellow.

Dr. Meier has published extensively in all major peer-reviewed medical journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association. She edited the first textbook on geriatric palliative care, as well as four editions of Geriatric Medicine, and she has contributed to more than 20 books on the subject of geriatrics and palliative care. As one of the leading figures in the field of palliative medicine, Dr. Meier has appeared numerous times on television and in print, including The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, ABC World News Tonight, Open Mind with Richard Hefner, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, New York Daily News, Newsday, The New Yorker, and Newsweek. She also figured prominently in the Bill Moyers series On Our Own Terms: Dying in America, a four-part documentary aired on PBS in 2002. Diane E. Meier received her BA from Oberlin College and her MD from Northwestern University Medical School. She completed her residency and fellowship training at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. She has been on the faculty of the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine and Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai since 1983. Dr. Meier lives in New York City with her husband, Dr. Warren Sherman, and their two children.