Elizabeth Dzeng, PhD, MD, MPH

Dr. Dzeng is a sociologist and hospitalist physician conducting research at the nexus of sociology, medical ethics, palliative care, health disparities, and human-centered design. She is an Associate Professor "In Residence" at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the Division of Hospital Medicine and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Cicely Saunders Institute at King's College London.

Her research program focuses on using sociological and human centered design methods to understand how institutional cultures and policies influence clinical practice patterns and how to change institutional culture to improve the quality of care. She conducts large-scale comparative ethnographic interview studies in the United States and the United Kingdom to understand the influence of institutional cultures and policies on clinicians’ ethical frameworks, communication practices, and clinical practice patterns around end-of-life care. A particular area of interest is around the influence of neoliberalism and specifically the culture and ethical implications of neoliberalism on an institution's ethical priorities around end-of-life care.

Her other major research focus is around using community-based participatory research methods to understand and address current limitations in delivering goal-concordant, high-quality care to all people, including serious illness care. She is funded by a NIA/NIH Beeson award and a Sojourns Scholars Leadership Award.

Among her national leadership roles, Dr. Dzeng is on the Society of General Internal Medicine's (SGIM) Governing Council Executive Committee as an At-large Member and a member of the Executive Committee of the Research Centers Cooperative Network (RCCN), a national coordinating center of the National Institutes on Aging (NIA) center programs.

Dr. Dzeng completed her PhD in Medical Sociology and an MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge at King’s College as a Gates Cambridge Scholar where she wrote her doctoral thesis on the influence of institutional cultures and policies on physicians’ ethical beliefs and how that impacted the way they communicate in end of life decision-making conversations. She was also a General Internal Medicine post-doctoral clinical research fellow and palliative care research fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. As an undergraduate and engineering graduate student at Stanford, she participated in the first class of Stanford's Biodesign Innovation program where she used design thinking to co-invented and patented a device to non-invasively cool the heart through the esophagus to prevent myocardial damage during a myocardial infarction (US Patent 7,758,623; 2010). In August, 2019 this patent was licensed to Attune Medical.

Outside of academic medicine, Dr. Dzeng is a competitive masters and club rower and has competed in races such as the Head of the Charles and won at the British Master Regatta. She is happiest when traveling the world, especially hiking and exploring the world's natural wonders.