Kate Courtright

Dr. Katherine (Kate) Courtright is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Director of Palliative Care Research in the Department of Medicine, and Core Faculty at the PAIR Center. She attends in the medical intensive care unit and on the inpatient palliative care consult team at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. 

Dr. Courtright’s research focuses on optimizing the quality and outcomes of palliative care for individuals with serious illness. Her major research interests include developing and implementing novel, scalable strategies to promote timely and equitable palliative care and serious illness communication and evaluating their effects in large pragmatic clinical trials. Relatedly, she is interested in developing innovative approaches to measure patient-centered outcomes reliably and pragmatically using routinely available clinical and administrative data.

Dr. Courtright co-led the two largest clinical trials conducted in the field of palliative care and serves as a Principal Investigator of three large, multi-site pragmatic clinical trials evaluating the real-world effectiveness and implementation context of embedded nudges to enhance primary and specialty palliative care in the hospital setting. As the Director of Palliative Care Research in the Department of Medicine at Penn, she oversees the implementation of evidence-based approaches to palliative care delivery across the Penn Medicine health system, and she serves as a mentor and advisor for multi-disciplinary trainees and early career faculty. She leads the Research Grants Core for the federally-funded IMPACT Collaboratory focused on improving dementia care through embedded pragmatic trials and is a member of the Pilot Grants Core in the ASCENT Consortium that aims to develop and support the palliative care scientific workforce.

The impact of Dr. Courtright’s work has been recognized with national awards, including the 2022 Early Career Investigator Award from the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and the 2025 Top 20 Research Achievement Award from the Clinical Research Forum. She has received grant funding from the National Palliative Care Research Center, National Institutes of Health, and Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

After graduating from Temple University School of Medicine (’08), Dr. Courtright completed an internal medicine residency (’11), chief residency (’12), and clinical fellowships in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine (’15) and Hospice and Palliative Medicine (’17) all at the University of Pennsylvania. During this time, she also received a Master of Science in Health Policy Research (’15).