FOUNDER

Alexis Drutchas, MD is a palliative care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Alexis trained in Family Medicine at Brown University during which time she co-founded the annual Rhode Island Trans Health Conference. After residency, Alexis worked as a primary care physician at Fenway Health and later went on to complete the Harvard Palliative Care Fellowship. She remained at MGH thereafter where in addition to her clinical work she co-leads serious illness communication training with The Continuum Project and co-leads the fellowship's health equity education efforts. She is also a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School-Fenway Health LGBQIA+ Health Fellowship Program. Alexis is an avid writer and was chosen to be a 2021 OpEd Project Public Voices Fellow. Her work has been featured in The New England Journal of Medicine, NBC, CNN, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, and Health Affairs, among others. Alexis grew up in Detroit and Hong Kong, and now lives in Boston with her wife and their son.

FOUNDER

Richard Leiter, MD, MA is palliative care physician, writer, and researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He serves as Director of the Adult Inpatient Palliative Care Consult Service and directs the Dana-Farber Department of Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care’s Writing Core. Ricky received his medical degree and an MA in Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He completed Internal Medicine residency and Chief Residency at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center before matriculating to the Harvard Interprofessional Palliative Care Fellowship Program. Ricky writes about the intersection of palliative care and ethics, and the emotional experience of working in the field. His writing has been published in the New York Times, The New England Journal of Medicine, STATNews, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, and Cell, among others.

FOUNDER

Rachel Rusch (LCSW, MSW, MA, APHSW-C) is the Palliative Care Education & Practice Coordinator with the Division of Comfort and Palliative Care at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles where she leads primary palliative care educational programming and implements arts based narrative interventions to improve health care outcomes. Her career experience includes pediatric palliative care clinical social work and early childhood development. Rachel is a recipient of the Cambia Health Foundation Sojourn’s Scholar Leadership Program grant, and her current research initiatives center on the power of story, narrative and the arts in palliative care.