Christina M. Puchalski is an associate professor of medicine and health sciences at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences and an associate professor of health services management and leadership at the university’s School of Public Health and Health Services. She is also the founder and director of The George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health, a center that develops educational, clinical, and research programs for physicians and other healthcare professionals. Her goal is to help foster compassionate systems of care for patients and their families through the recognition of spirituality as an essential component of medicine. She is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the integration of spirituality into clinical care. Dr. Puchalski earned a bachelor’s degree cum laude in biochemistry and a master’s degree cum laude in biology at the University of California at Los Angeles. She did further graduate work in biology at The Johns Hopkins University and earned an M.D. in 1994 at The George Washington University School of Medicine. Prior to entering medical school, she worked as an adjunct scientist in biochemistry and molecular biology at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She did her residency in internal medicine at The George Washington University Medical Center and subsequently completed a fellowship there in primary care. Dr. Puchalski joined the faculty of The George Washington University School of Medicine in 1998. She is board certified in internal medicine and in palliative care and maintains an active clinical practice. Her research interests include the role of spirituality in healthcare, especially at the end of life, the role of clergy in health and in end-of-life care, and the development and evaluation of educational programs in spirituality and health. She completed a course in spiritual formation at the Shalem Institute in Washington, D.C. and is a member of The Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites. Her work has been supported by the NIH, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation among others. A recipient of a John Templeton Foundation Spirituality and Medicine Curricular Award for a course in spirituality and medicine that she is teaching at The George Washington University School of Medicine, she also has received the Association of American Medical Colleges and Pfizer Award for the Medical Humanities Initiative and the Faculty Humanism Award given by the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey. In 2005, she was elected a member of The Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism Honor Society and received its Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award. Dr. Puchalski has chaired a national education conference sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and a task force with the AAMC on developing guidelines for teaching spirituality as it relates to issues of culture and end-of-life care in medical education. She has been associate course director for Harvard Medical School and the Mind/Body Medical Institute’s annual Spirituality & Healing in Medicine conference for five consecutive years. Additionally, she was a co-convener of the spirituality task force for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Last Acts Campaign and has given numerous presentations at medical schools and national conferences. Dr. Puchalski formerly served on the advisory board of the John Templeton Foundation and currently serves on the advisory board the Loyola University Center for Spirituality in Health Care. A member of the editorial boards of Supportive Cancer Therapy, Palliative & Supportive Care, and Spirituality and Health International, she has contributed numerous articles to academic journals and general interest magazines and newspapers, as well as essays to volumes of collected works. One of her articles for Spiritual Life, “Touching the Spirit: The Essence of Healing,” received a prize from the National Catholic Press Association in 2000. Her first book, A Time for Listening and Caring: Spirituality and the Care of the Chronically Ill and Dying, was published last year by Oxford University Press.