Current Work

Dr. Dzeng is a sociologist and hospitalist physician conducting research at the nexus of sociology, medical ethics, palliative and end-of-life care, and human-centered design. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the Division of Palliative Medicine and Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology program. Her current research examines the influence of neoliberalism and specifically the culture and ethical implications of neoliberalism on an institution's ethical priorities in the United States and United Kingdom and its effects on the provision of non-beneficial high-intensity life-sustaining treatments near the end of life in older adults with dementia and serious illness. 

Education & Experience

Liz Dzeng completed her PhD degree in Medical Sociology and an MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge at King’s College as a Gates Cambridge Scholar where she wrote her doctoral thesis on the influence of institutional cultures and policies on physicians’ ethical beliefs and how that impacted the way they communicate in end-of-life decision-making conversations. She was also a General Internal Medicine post-doctoral clinical research fellow and palliative care research fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. As an undergraduate and engineering graduate student at Stanford, she participated in the first class of Stanford's Biodesign Innovation program where she co-invented and patented a device to non-invasively cool the heart through the esophagus to prevent myocardial damage during a myocardial infarction (US Patent 7,758,623; 2010). In August 2019 this patent was licensed to Attune Medical.

Awards & Honors

Among her national leadership roles, Dr. Dzeng currently serves as the Chair of the Ethics Committee at the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM), Chair of the Innovations in Health Care Delivery and SGIM Annual Meeting planning committee, and an Associate Editor for the Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM). In addition, she has been on the SGIM's special workgroup on the Social Determinants of Health which recently released a position statement for SGIM. She is also on the Scientific Review Committee for the National Palliative Care Research Center (NPCRC) and on the Annual Meeting planning committee for Clin-STAR.