A Beginner's Guide to the End

Dr. BJ Miller, Jr. is a hospice and palliative care specialist. He is an assistant professor of clinical medicine at UCSF where he attends on the Symptom Management Service at UCSF’s Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Center, one of the first community-based palliative care programs in the country. He is also a long-time director of the Zen Hospice Project, a pioneering hospice organization in San Francisco.

BJ is a native of Chicago. He studied art history as an undergraduate at Princeton University. He worked for several years for art and disability-rights nonprofit organizations before earning a medical degree at UCSF. He completed an internal medicine residency at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, where he was chief resident, and a fellowship in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at Harvard Medical School, working at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In his work, he connects humanism and medicine in end-of-life and upstream palliative care.

Shoshana Berger (Author)

Shoshana got her start as a writer for a magazine called Bikini for whom she interviewed Jeff Buckley and Allen Ginsberg. That led to writing for the New York Times, SPIN, WIRED, and a stint as the editorial director (more like “cool-hunter”) for Young & Rubicam. With little more than a fuzzy idea and a boil in the blood, she went on to found ReadyMade, a national do-it-yourself design magazine. The venture was funded by 10 credit cards. (Her credit rating is excellent). ReadyMade was a finalist for National Magazine Awards in 2005 and 2006. After co-authoring the book ReadyMade: How to Make Almost Everything (Clarkson Potter), she sold the business to the Meredith Corp., publisher of Better Homes & Gardens. Shoshana then joined WIRED as director of special projects in 2011, and launched a new website, WIRED Design. She landed at IDEO in 2013 as editorial director and hasn’t looked back.