Dr. Krakauer is Assistant Professor of Medicine and of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a practicing internist and palliative medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital where he also co-chairs the clinical ethics committee. He has been working in Vietnam since 2001 when he founded the Vietnam-CDC-Harvard Medical School AIDS Partnership (VCHAP) to provide training and technical assistance in HIV/AIDS treatment to Vietnam’s physicians and nurses in partnership with the Ministry of Health and thereby to help enable introduction and scale-up of anti-retroviral therapy. As Director of International Programs at the Harvard Medical School Center for Palliative Care since 2005, he has assisted Vietnam’s Ministry of Health and major cancer centers and general hospitals to integrate pain relief and palliative care into the country’s healthcare system. He also is working with Partners In Health, an NGO based at Harvard Medical School, to integrate palliative care into cancer and non-communicable disease treatment programs in Rwanda and Malawi.
Dr. Krakauer studied German literature and philosophy at Columbia and in Berlin and received his PhD in philosophy and MD from Yale. He trained in internal medicine and medical ethics at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He was a Faculty Scholar of the Project on Death in America and currently serves as a Consultant to the International Palliative Care Initiative of the Open Society Foundations. He also is an Associate Faculty Member of the San Diego Institute of Palliative Medicine and a member of the International Expert Collaborative of the International Pain Policy Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin.
