Keck School Faculty

As a clinician-educator, Dr. Puri believes that teaching primary palliative medicine across medical disciplines and to all levels of trainees is essential to meet the growing need for palliative medicine in our country. She is committed to developing creative approaches to teaching advanced communciation skills and symptom management. In her clinical practice, she has a particular interest in palliative medicine for cardiac, surgical and ICU patients, and in developing educational curricula for surgeons and cardiologists on earlier integration of palliative medicine into their patients’ care.

Dr. Puri’s research and teaching interests also include clinical ethics. She is a member of Keck Hospital’s Ethics Committee and the Humanities & Ethics Curriculum Committee for the medical school. She teaches "Advanced Clinical Ethics" to second-year medical students at the Keck School of Medicine. Dr. Puri also writes creative nonfiction, and her work has appeared in the "A Piece of My Mind" section in the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA Internal Medicine, and Slate. She is currently working on an original collection of creative nonfiction essays reflecting on end-of-life care in the United States, one of which will appear in the New York Times in January 2016. In 2015, she was named a finalist for the PEN Center’s Emerging Voices Writers’ Fellowship.