AAHPM reached out to the 2024 Emerging Leaders to gain insight into what motivated them to pursue leadership positions and what they find more fulfilling in their experiences. Amy Porter, MD PhD has been recognized as one of the exceptional individuals chosen as a 2024 AAHPM Emerging Leader in Hospice and Palliative Care.
Who has most influenced your work and how have they shaped your contributions?
The children and families who have been willing to share their stories, their hopes, their worries, their challenges, and their joys have guided me in figuring out what experiences to explore and how to study them. When I was paired with a patient, his family, and their neurologist as a first-year medical student, I could not have imagined how much my longitudinal connection with them would shape my study of rest and rejuvenation among parents of children with serious illness and medical complexity. I return to the way Pat O’Malley inspired me to enter this field nearly every day. My teams of pediatric palliative care comrades across professions and institutions – Boston Children’s PACT team and MGH’s Supportive and Palliative Care team – think and wonder with me as we work together to care for patients and their families. My co-fellows and sounding boards – Sarah Halix and Allie Wise – will forever ground me as I pursue this often-devastating work. My partner in “illumination” of unseen experiences, Sarah McCarthy, inspires me daily in her honesty, reflexivity, and capacity to find awe amidst tremendous adversity. Our community of early- and mid-career pediatric palliative care researchers that has emerged over the last few years sustains me – and we remind each other again and again of the “why” behind our collective research endeavors. My anthropology mentors – Paul Farmer and Arthur Kleinman – and my overarching career mentor – Allan Brandt – have held space for my inquiry and encouraged me unconditionally for two decades. And finally, my research mentors – Jennifer Snaman, Joanne Wolfe, Abby Rosenberg, and Erica Kaye – gently and patiently push me to question my assumptions and think outside-the-box, making my work both more representative of patient and family experience and more practically useful for clinicians striving to support those patients and families.
What is the significance to you of being recognized as a “Emerging Leader” in Hospice and Palliative Medicine?
I feel so lucky to be a part of the growing field of pediatric palliative care research. I can only hope that being recognized as an “Emerging Leader” makes the work that my colleagues, mentors, and I do more visible and thus more helpful to children, their families, and the clinicians who strive to care for both.
What is your aspiration for the evolution of hospice and Palliative Medicine?
I hope that the field of pediatric palliative care continues to grow – teaching pediatric medical teams at large to practice primary palliative care and further discerning what subspecialty palliative care has to add in support of children and their families throughout the illness trajectory. I also hope that pediatric palliative care research continues to develop capacity and funding opportunities, so that we can build the science of supporting children and their families through serious illness and medical complexity. I would love to see more serious social science inquiry in palliative care research, using anthropology, sociology, and social theory to study the complexities of living with and caring for people living with serious illness.
Learn more about the AAHPM 2024 Emerging Leaders in Hospice and Palliative Care and view a full list of all current and past Emerging Leaders.