Dr Dzeng is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cicely Saunders Institute at the King's College London, an Associate Professor of Medicine and Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health.

Her research focuses on understanding the systems-level factors that contribute to potentially non-beneficial, high-intensity, end-of-life care in older adults with and without dementia in the US and UK. She uses human centred design to design interventions that mitigate that culture of high-intensity care.

One focus of this research is around the effects of neoliberalism on the culture and ethics of healthcare institutions and how that contributes to patterns of high-intensity end-of-life care.

Her research also focuses on using community based participatory methods to understand how structural racism influences goal-concordance near the end of life in older Black adults.

She completed her MPhil and PhD as a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge and her MD, MPH, and General Internal Medicine Fellowship at Johns Hopkins.

Her design experience stems from her work as an undergraduate and graduate student at Stanford where she invented a medical device to non-invasively cool the heart through the oesophagus to prevent myocardial damage during a myocardial infarction (US Patent 7,758,623; 2010). In August 2019 this patent was licensed to Attune Medical. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM).

Research

• medical sociology
• medical ethics
• end of life care
• palliative care
• moral distress
• Burdensome or overly aggressive care
• neoliberalism
• structural racism
• social justice
• anti-racism
• human centred design
• ecosystem design

Further details

See Elizabeth's research profile