Sunita Puri

Sunita Puri is the medical director of the Palliative Medicine and Supportive Care Service at the Keck Hospital and Norris Cancer Center of the University of Southern California, where she also serves as chair of the Ethics Committee. She graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Anthropology and studied Modern History at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. She completed medical school and residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, and fellowship training in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at Stanford University. Her book, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, interweaves evocative stories of her family and the patients she cares for, arming readers with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us.

While at the Mesa Refuge in 2017, she worked on a memoir exploring her experience caring for impoverished residents of South Los Angeles, sharing observations about how social and economic inequalities shape patients’ lives and deaths. In 2023, she worked on her second book, exploring how caring for patients helped her understand her own experiences of grief and trauma. About the Mesa Refuge, Sunita said:

“Mesa Refuge provided me, and many other writers, with the material and spiritual support needed to write, think, and share our ideas with the wider world. I was at three writing residencies to complete my book, but Mesa changed my life in particular ways; the land underneath and around it inspired me in ways nothing and nobody else could. Without the gift of time, space, and support I found at the Mesa Refuge, I would have written a lesser book.”

Sunita is the recipient of writing residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, as well as the Mesa Refuge. She was a finalist for the PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship in 2015. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and JAMA – Internal Medicine. Her March 2020 opinion piece was published in the New York Times: It’s Time to Talk about Death.

At the University of Southern California, Sunita is heavily involved in medical education. She teaches principles of palliative medicine and advanced clinical ethics to medical students, residents, and fellows, and has been interviewed by the New York Times, the BBC, and NPR to discuss topics ranging from physician aid-in-dying to the experience of practicing palliative care. In 2018, she received the Etz Chaim Tree of Life Award from the USC Keck School of Medicine, awarded annually to a member of the faculty who, in the eyes of the campus community, models and provides humanistic and compassionate care.