Dr. Curtis has been a pulmonary, critical care, and palliative care physician at Harborview Medical Center at the University of Washington. He also holds the A. Bruce Montgomery – American Lung Association Endowed Chair in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and he is the founding Director of the Cambia Palliative Care Center of Excellence at UW Medicine. He has an active research program with over 25 years of continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health and has also received funding from a number of foundations including the Cambia Health Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the East Seattle Foundation and the Greenwall Foundation. His research focuses on improving palliative care for patients with serious illness as well as for patients’ families. He has authored more than 350 peer-reviewed research articles and more than 150 editorials and chapters. His publications have been in high-impact journals including JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and JAMA Internal Medicine. Dr. Curtis has been the recipient of several lifetime achievement awards and other awards for his research and teaching in palliative care including a Lifetime Achievement Award and Mentoring Award by the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Dr. Curtis has made mentoring in palliative care research a priority during his career. He was the founding Director of a T32 award training research fellows in palliative care research from NHLBI. He is also a dual Director of an additional T32 award for pulmonary and critical care research that has been funded for over 30 years by NHLBI and is a multiple Director of an Implementation Science K12 Award, also from NHLBI for training the next generation of researchers.
