Karleen Giannitrapani, PhD, MPH, MA

Dr Karleen Giannitrapani is an Assistant Professor in Division of Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford University School of Medicine and also serves as the quality lead for the section of Palliative Medicine. They are also a Core Investigator at the Center for Innovation to Implementation (Ci2i) in the VA Palo Alto Health Care System as well as a Director of the VA Quality Improvement Resource Center (QuIRC) for Palliative Care, supporting Geriatrics and Extended Care programs for 170 Veterans Affairs facilities nationally. In QuIRC they lead a portfolio of projects on improving the processes that interdisciplinary teams can leverage to improve pain and symptom management among high-risk patients; a specific focus of their work is to bridge the gap of poor palliative care integration in the perioperative period.

They received a 5-year VA Career Development Award on building better teams across disciplines and was an American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine Research Scholar for related work. They have a Masters of Arts in African Studies, a Master of Public Health, and a PhD in Health Policy & Management with a Concentration in Organizational Behavior, all from UCLA. Their expertise includes organizational behavior, implementation science, mixed methods-research, quality improvement, pain and palliative care research, and global health services research.