New Faculty Director for the CSUSM Institute of Palliative Care

The Office of Graduate Studies and Research is pleased to announce that Dr. Michael McDuffie has been appointed Faculty Director of the Institute for Palliative Care at CSUSM, effective July 1st, 2019. Dr. McDuffie succeeds the founding Faculty Director, Dr. Sharon Hamill.

Dr. Hamill launched the CSUSM Institute for Palliative Care as Faculty Director in the summer of 2014. Under her leadership, palliative care education programs expanded each year, and in her final year, programs through the institute reached more than 7,000 people. Some of the programs that Dr. Hamill helped to establish include the “What Gives Your Life Meaning: WGYLM” annual campaign, the Youth Resiliency Project, “Aging with Grace”, the annual Professional Palliative Care Conference at CSUSM, and the St. Francis Soup Kitchen Project. These programs provide content to educate participants about health care choices, advance directive, resiliency skills, and palliative care education.

Dr. Michael McDuffie joined CSUSM as an Assistant Professor in 1996, and he is now Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy. Dr. McDuffie serves as Community Member on both the Hospital Ethics Committee for Palomar Health and Rady Children’s Hospital SD, and the Clinical Ethics Consulting Team at Palomar Health. He also serves as the Public at-large Patient Representative on the Critical Care Medicine Subspecialty Board of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM). Professor McDuffie is the Chair-Elect of the San Diego Coalition for Compassionate Care (SDCCC), an organization the Institute for Palliative Care at CSUSM collaborates with for the annual Professional Palliative Care Conference at CSUSM.

We thank Dr. Hamill for her service over these past 5 years, and welcome Dr. McDuffie to the Faculty Director position.