Jennifer Walter, MD, PhD, MS

Jennifer K. Walter, MD, PhD, MS is an Associate Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Since her training in both medicine and philosophy at Georgetown University, Dr. Walter has worked at the intersection of clinical practice and bioethics with an emphasis on the physician-patient relationship and family-centered care. Her current research focuses on facilitating and improving communication between the health care team and families of children with chronic and terminal illness. She is currently co-designing and testing an interprofessional team intervention to improve how teams communicate with families in shared decision making conversations. Dr. Walter’s work also includes co-design of interventions to increase subspecialty palliative care involvement for pediatric oncology patients. Her work incorporates empirical analysis of the boundaries of ethical interactions between physicians and their patients and an analysis of factors influencing vulnerable subjects’ participation in clinical research. Dr. Walter attended the Georgetown University School of Medicine, where she earned her MD and PhD in Philosophy with a concentration in Ethics in 2007. She was an intern and resident in pediatrics at University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital from 2007-2010. Dr. Walter was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Michigan from 2010-2012 where she earned her Master of Science in Health and Health care research. She currently receives funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.