BJ Miller, MD--Dying: Exploring the Terrain

Part of the End-of-Life Conversations Series.

BJ is the executive director of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco where he works to bridge medical and social models of care in effort to provide the finest palliative care available. This necessitates a broader multi-disciplinary approach to caregiving and offers a model for the synergistic integration of arts and sciences. This also opens new possibilities for lay/volunteer and professional training and scholarship.

All efforts of the Zen Hospice Project are grounded in a shared sense of interdependence, impermanence, and an embrace of the unknown. By taking the human condition as the primary fulcrum for palliative care, his larger goal is to affect social angst concerning mortality and its vital role in humanity's thirst for meaning and communion.

BJ Miller graduated from Princeton University in the Department of Art & Archaeology in 1993, and received his MD from UCSF as a Regents Scholar in 2001. He completed his internal medicine residency at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara where he served as chief resident. He completed his fellowship in Hospice & Palliative Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where his clinical duties split between the Massachusetts General Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He continues to attend in the Symptom Management Service of the UCSF Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center, UCSF's groundbreaking outpatient palliative care clinic. His academic support has largely served palliative care education and leadership development. In 2010, in only his third year on faculty, BJ received the William Osler Award, the School of Medicine's highest faculty award.