Colleen M. Farrell, MD is a pulmonary and critical care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she teaches medical ethics.

Colleen received her BA in Women’s and Gender Studies from Williams College and her MD from Harvard Medical School. She completed her residency in primary care internal medicine at NYU/Bellevue Hospital, her fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at NewYork Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medicine, and her fellowship in clinical ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is an alumna of the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics and the Rudin Fellowship for Medical Ethics and Humanities. Prior to attending medical school, she was on the research staff of The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute.

Throughout her medical training, Colleen has written candidly about the emotional and ethical challenges of medicine, including from the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, JAMA, Academic Medicine and CHEST, among others publications. Her current projects are focused on nursing care in ICUs.

An advocate for the arts and humanities in medicine, in 2019 Colleen founded MedHumChat, a social media initiative that facilitates discussions of art, poetry and prose amongst healthcare students, professionals, and patients. During her two years as director, she and her team hosted 46 Twitter chats, created 90 publicly available discussion guides, and garnered over 10k followers.

She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband and two sons.