Nicole Piemonte, Ph.D.

Nicole is passionate about bringing healing to those who are committed to healing others. She has spent the last 12 years teaching medical students, residents, and clinicians about compassion, suffering, and the lived experience of illness and loss. She currently serves as the Associate Dean for Faculty Leadership and a Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at a medical school in Phoenix, Arizona. 

Much of Nicole’s work is shaped by her own personal story. She was the primary caregiver for her mother who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when Nicole was twenty. When her mother died two years later, Nicole wanted to better understand the silence around death and dying in medicine that led to her mother dying in the hospital instead of at home where she wanted to be. So, Nicole focused her graduate studies on uncovering why medical culture struggles with vulnerability, suffering, and grief.

This work led Nicole to pursue a PhD in medical humanities at The University of Texas Medical Branch where she studied philosophy, medical ethics, literature and medicine, and medical epistemology and pedagogy. She has published two books with The MIT press, Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice (2018) and Death and Dying (2021), which draws on her father’s cancer experience and death, eight years after her mother’s death. 

Nicole feels called to helping clinicians and trainees express both the pain and beauty that comes with a life in healthcare. She is committed to helping others find the courage to slow down and look deeper—at themselves, at their work, at their life—to move forward with intention and purpose. She has been honored to share her message at universities and healthcare centers across the country and to collaborate with leaders to think of new ways forward in healthcare and healthcare education. As a trained coach, Nicole works one-on-one with clinicians who are looking to reconnect to meaning and purpose in their work, to uncover the reasons why they were drawn to be a healer in the first place, and to help them move forward in new directions, both professionally and personally.