Home  /  CHP News  /  Alumni Spotlight  /  Alumni Update  /  Contact us

Faculty in the Spotlight    /    Faculty from the Past

Dan Shapiro, Ph.D. is the director of the medical humanities program and  an associate professor of clinical psychiatry in the College of Medicine at the University of Arizona.  He earned his PhD at the University of Florida and went on to Harvard Medical School where he completed an internship at McLean Hospital and an endowed fellowship in medical crisis counseling at Boston Children's Hospital, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and the Brigham and Women's Hospital.

He's been on the faculty at the University of Arizona College of Medicine since 1995 and currently teaches behavioral medicine and ethics to first and second year medical students.  He's most proud of a program he created designed to teach medical students about life with chronic illness.  He's developed a project called the "Medical Students as Filmmakers, Patients as Teachers Video Project: The Video Slam" in which students go to patient's homes and videotape their lives over 8 months and then edit their films down and show them to other students as part of the curriculum.  The program will be featured on the cover of the November issue of Academic Physician and Scientist.  He's won a number of teaching awards and was invited by last year's graduating students to present their graduation address.

Dan's writings have appeared in the New York Times, JAMA, AARP magazine, Salon.Com, and on National Public Radio's: All Things Considered.   His first book, Moms Marijuana, about his personal cancer experience, was published in October 2000 by Harmony Books (a Random House imprint) and appeared as a Vintage paperback in fall 2001.  It has now been translated into Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian.  His second book, about a physician's error, is titled Delivering Doctor Amelia and is now required readings at a number of medical schools.  He's currently writing a novel.

As a result of expertise as someone who has lived on "both sides of the bed", he has been featured in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Elle Magazine, the Today Show, NPR's Talk of the Nation, ABCNEWS.COM, Salon.Com and a number of other periodicals.  He speaks widely to groups of health professionals and patients.

He realized after leaving Florida that the training there was top notch, and regrets feeling that the only reason he passed the defense was that he scheduled it at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon on the first day of Spring.  He currently lives with his wife Terry and their two daughters, Alexandra, age 11 and Abigail, age 8.  He still misses the canoe trips down the Suwannee he took every Thanksgiving with Tim Tumlin, Adam Fuller and Dave York. See Dan's website at http://www.danshapiro.org.