Kate Courtright Promoted to Associate Professor of Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine

Congratulations to Kate Courtright on her promotion to Associate Professor!

We are thrilled to share the news of Dr. Kate Courtright’s promotion to Associate Professor of Medicine with Tenure.

Dr. Courtright joined the PAIR Center in 2013 as a Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellow at Penn, where she also completed the Master of Science in Health Policy Research Program and the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship. In 2019 she was appointed as an Assistant Professor in Medicine and joined the Core Faculty at the PAIR Center. In addition to her roles as research faculty and palliative care clinician, she is the Director of Palliative Care Research in the Department of Medicine, overseeing the implementation of evidence-based approaches to palliative care delivery across Penn Medicine and serving as a mentor to multi-disciplinary trainees and early career faculty.

Dr. Courtright achieved many successes early in her career. Her systematic review examining the prevalence of advance directives in the US was one of the top ten most-read Health Affairs articles of 2017. In 2021 she was recognized with the Edward Holmes Award for Early Career Faculty from the Department of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine. The following year she received the Early Career Investigator Award from the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.

Dr. Courtright’s research agenda aims to optimize palliative care delivery by identifying the patients that will benefit the most from palliative care services, the specific services that will meet patients’ palliative care needs, and which clinicians should provide the care and when. She has become a nationally-recognized leader in palliative care research, specifically large pragmatic trials. She co-led the REDAPS trial, the largest ever clinical trial conducted in the field of palliative care of its time, earning recognition with the 2025 Top 20 Research Achievement Award from the Clinical Research Forum. Today, she serves as a Principal Investigator for two large, multi-site pragmatic clinical trials evaluating the effectiveness and implementation of palliative care in the hospital setting, including COMPASS-PC whose size eclipses REDAPS. She leads the Research Grants Core for the National Institute on Aging’s IMPACT Collaboratory which focuses on building capacity to conduct pragmatic clinical trials for people living with dementia. She is also a member of Pilot and Exploratory Studies Core of the ASCENT Consortium, a national research initiative that aims to develop and support the palliative care scientific workforce.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Courtright on her promotion.