Sunita Puri, Medical Director of the Palliative Medicine Service at Keck Hospital

Dr. Sunita Puri is the Medical Director of the Palliative Medicine Service at Keck Hospital and Norris Cancer Center of the University of Southern California, where she also serves as Chair of the Ethics Committee. Sunita is the author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a critically acclaimed literary memoir examining her journey to the practice of palliative medicine, and her quest to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. Sunita received writing residencies at the MacDowell Colony, UCross Foundation, and Mesa Refuge, and was a finalist for the PEN Center's Emerging Voices Writing Fellowship. The recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. In 2018, she was awarded the Etz Chaim Tree of Life Award from the USC School of Medicine, awarded annually to a member of the faculty who, in the eyes of the campus community, models and provides humanistic and compassionate care.