Dr. Kathleen Puntillo is Professor Emeritus in Nursing and Research Scientist at the University of California, San Francisco. She has an active and long-standing program of research on pain in critically ill and injured patients and procedural pain.

Dr. Puntillo has expanded her research to include investigations of symptom assessment and management in intensive care unit (ICU) patients at high risk of dying. Her current study, a follow-up to an NIH-funded study of symptoms in ICU patients at high risk of dying, is funded by the National Palliative Care Research Center. She is pilot-testing non-pharmacologic interventions for thirst and pain in ICU patients. Dr. Puntillo is a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and was a Faculty Scholar with the Project on Death in America. She has received many awards including the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses' (AACN) Distinguished Researcher Award and the Society of Critical Care Medicine' (SCCM) Grenvik Family Award for Ethics. She is actively involved in many professional organizations including AACN, SCCM, and the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine. She practices critical care nursing on a regular basis and publishes and lectures extensively on the topics of pain, palliative care, and symptom management.