Eric L. Krakauer, MD ’92, PhD ’91, RES ’95, is a global leader in palliative care whose career spans clinical practice, ethics, and global health. After earning both his MD and PhD from Yale and completing residency at Yale New Haven Hospital, he trained in general internal medicine and medical ethics at Harvard. He has practiced at Massachusetts General Hospital since 1997, where he helped establish one of the country’s first palliative care training programs and co‑chaired its clinical ethics committee.
As founder and director of the Program in Global Palliative Care at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Krakauer has worked for nearly three decades with ministries of health, universities, and clinicians in countries across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe to expand access to pain relief and palliative care. As Medical Officer for Palliative Care at the World Health Organization (WHO), he led development of WHO guidance for integrating palliative care into primary care, pediatrics, and humanitarian response. He has also served on the Lancet Commission on Global Access to Palliative Care and was a Fulbright Scholar in Vietnam, where he helped found the first academic palliative care department in a low‑ or middle-income country.
His most recent book, Clinical Manual of Palliative Care for Any Setting: Toward Universal Contextually‑Adapted Access (2025), reflects his longstanding commitment and global collaborations to respond in culturally-appropriate ways to the unnecessary suffering of the indigent seriously-ill.