Dr. Diane Meier is Director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care, a national initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, devoted to increasing the number of hospital and nursing home based 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; Catherine Gaisman Professor of Medical Ethics; and Chief of the Division of Geriatrics for the Department of Medicine, at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (NY).

Dr. Meier is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Institute on Aging Academic Award, the Open Society Institute Faculty Scholar's Award of the Project on Death in America, and the Alexander Richman Commemorative Award for Humanism in Medicine. She is currently the recipient of a five-year NIA Academic Career Leadership Award focusing on palliative care of the elderly and the mentoring and support of junior faculty in palliative medicine.

Dr. Meier has published extensively in all major peer-reviewed medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. She is editor of the first textbook on Geriatric Palliative Care, as well as four editions of Geriatric Medicine, and has contributed to over 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 in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and The New Yorker, among many others. She also figured prominently in the Bill Moyers series, On Our Own Terms: Dying in America, a four-part documentary aired on PBS.

Diane E. Meier received her BA from Oberlin College, and her M.D. 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 Departments of Geriatrics and Medicine at Mount Sinai since 1983. She lives in New York City with her husband, Dr. Warren Sherman, and their two children.