Biography

	Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, DLitt (Hon), FACP is an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital, and Associate Professor of Medicine at New York University School of Medicine. She divides her time between seeing patients, teaching medical students and residents, editing and writing. Dr. Ofri was born in New York City.

She studied physiology as an undergraduate at McGill University in Montreal. She spent the next decade at New York University Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital for her medical and scientific education. She obtained her PhD in biochemistry along with her MD, followed by a residency at Bellevue in internal medicine.

After residency, Dr. Ofri spent nearly two years traveling. She worked as a free-lance physician in a variety of communities from East Hampton to rural New Mexico. In between job assignments she spent time in Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Peru learning Spanish for her eventual return to inner-city medicine. During her travels she dragged along her laptop, grateful to finally have time to write down the stories that had accumulated during her years at Bellevue. These stories have been published in numerous literary and medical journals, and are collected in her first book, Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue.

Dr. Ofri’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Los Angeles Times, and on National Public Radio. Her writings have been included in Best American Essays 2002 and 2005, and Best American Science Writing 2003. She is the recipient of the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize for nonfiction and the McGovern award by the American Medical Writers Association for “preeminent contributions to medical communication.” She has received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Curry College and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.

Dr. Ofri has a particular interest in the relationship of literature and medicine. She has introduced a program encouraging medical students to experiment with literary descriptions of patient encounters to help explore the complexities of illness.

Dr. Ofri is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of the Bellevue Literary Review, a literary journal devoted to writings about the human body, illness, health and healing. She was also Associate Chief Editor of the Bellevue Guide to Outpatient Medicine, a textbook of internal medicine that was awarded the annual Best Medical Textbook award by the American Medical Writers’ Association

Dr. Ofri lives in New York with her husband, three children, and dog. In her free time Dr. Ofri has studied modern dance at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, and is now a student of the cello. She has been seen zipping through Manhattan traffic on her rickety old ten-speed.

photo credit: Troi Santos

Read Danielle Ofri’s essay about doctor-writers from The Lancet