Program Leadership

Program Directors

Nathan Goldstein, M.D., Assistant Professor of Geriatrics and Internal Medicine, is the Director of the Integrated Palliative Medicine Fellowship. He is a clinician-investigator whose research efforts focus on the ways that clinicians and patients make decisions about the use of advanced technologies at the end of life. He has published extensively on this and other palliative medicine topics. He is the recipient of multiple awards including the American Geriatric Society New Investigator Award, the Hartford Geriatric Health Outcomes Award and a Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award. In addition, he travels throughout the country speaking on a wide array of palliative care topics.

Lynn Bunch, M.D., Assistant Professor in the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development, is the Co-director of the Integrated Palliative Medcicine Fellowship. Her areas of expertise include palliative care and pain in older adults. Dr. Bunch is a clinician educator whose work focuses on teaching the tenets of palliative care as well as the communication skills required to care for patients with serious illness. She is active in community outreach and lectures to community groups across New York City on a variety of topics related to palliative care. She is an attending physician with Mount Sinai’s inpatient palliative care consult service and outpatient palliative care practice.

Senior Program Mentorship

Diane Meier, M.D., is Director of the Lilian and Benjamin Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute, Professor of Geriatrics and Internal Medicine, and Catherine Gaisman Professor of Medical Ethics at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She is also Director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care, a national initiative originally funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation devoted to increasing the number of hospital and nursing home based palliative care programs in the United States. Dr. Meier is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Institute on Aging Academic Career Development 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. Her major interests include medical decision-making affecting end of life, promotion of palliative medicine practice in tertiary care, and medical education in the care of patients with serious and life threatening illness. Dr. Meier has published extensively in all major peer-reviewed medical journals. 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.

R. Sean Morrison, M.D., is Director of the National Palliative Care Research Center, Vice-Chair for Research at the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development, Director of Research at the Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute and Hermann Merkin Professor of Palliative Care at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Morrison’s research focuses on decision making at the end of life, pain and symptom management in high-risk and medically underserved populations, and quality measures in palliative care. He has received numerous awards for his research in geriatrics and palliative care and has been named a Brookdale National Fellow, an Open Society Institute Project on Death in America Faculty Scholar and an American Federation for Aging Research Paul Beeson Faculty Scholar. He is an active clinician who cares for healthy older adults and those with serious illness.