She attended Stanford University and Case Western Reserve University Medical School. She obtained a Masters in Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley. Her medical training includes an Internal Medicine residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a Pulmonary/Critical Care fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She is a co-founder of Vital Decisions, which provides telephone-based counseling for patients with life-limiting illness. She has been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is working on her first book dealing with death and dying in the ICU. She lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area.