UW professor honored with physician award

SEATTLE, WASH. — Dr. Rashmi Kumar Sharma, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Washington, was honored with the 2016 Hastings Center Cunniff-Dixon Early-Career Physician Award on June 15 at the UW campus in Seattle, Wash., for improving palliative care.

The award was presented by Matthew A. Baxter, founder of the Cunniff-Dixon Foundation. One of three doctors to receive the award nationally, Sharma is particularly interested in the way race/ethnicity influences doctor-patient communication about end-of-life care in the hospital.

Her research, which is funded by a large grant from the American Cancer Society, focuses on decreasing disparities in palliative care, specifically in relation to racial, ethnic, socioeconomic and gender differences.

Palliative care is specialized medical care for people with serious illnesses and focuses on optimizing quality of life and supporting patients and families as they navigate complex medical decisions. Palliative care addresses a patient’s physical, emotional, social and spiritual needs in the setting of any serious illness.

The Cunniff-Dixon Foundation was created in 2005 in honor of Carley Cunniff and in recognition of Dr. Peter Dixon, her attending physician during the three years she battled with breast cancer.

Sharma received her M.D. at UW and an M.H.S. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She lives in Kirkland, Wash., with her husband, Vikrant, and daughter Amaya. Born in Pullman, Wash., her parents came to the US from India in 1970 as graduate students.

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(L-R) Dr. Rashmi Kumar Sharma, Cunniff-Dixon Foundation founder Matthew A. Baxter,