B.J. Miller

As Executive Director, B.J. is proud to lead an organization bridging the spiritual and humanitarian approaches to end-of-life care. His years of medical training and practice support his efforts to combine social and medical models into a more comprehensive approach to caring for those of us nearing death. His great hope, by tending to this fraught and concentrated phase of life, is to mitigate our existential angst and better allow our community to live fully until death.

Raised in Chicago, B.J. studied art history as an undergraduate at Princeton University. After several years working in both the art and disability-rights non-profit communities he enrolled at UCSF where he completed his MD as a Regents' Scholar in 2001. He completed his internal medicine residency at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara where he served as chief resident. He completed his fellowship in Hospice & Palliative Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where his clinical duties split between the Massachusetts General Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

B.J. remains an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF where he still attends on the Palliative Care Service at UCSF Medical Center, as well as in the Symptom Management Service of the UCSF Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center, UCSF’s groundbreaking outpatient palliative care clinic. His academic work has largely focused on palliative care education and leadership development. B.J. is also supported by the Fetzer Foundation in his efforts to build an integrative higher education model devoted to interrelating spirituality with the health of mind and body.

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