Colleen M. Farrell, MD is a pulmonary and critical care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, MA and a writer. She is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, where she teaches medical ethics and clinical skills.

Colleen writes candidly about the emotional and ethical challenges she has faced in medical training and practice. Her 2019 JAMA essay “Systole and Diastole: Strength and Openness” about her experience with depression as a medical student was selected as one of forty best JAMA essays published between 2010-2019 for a commemorative issue in 2020. Her feature length works weaving her experiences working in the ICU and as new mother with insights into health justice and the politics of care have been published in The Nation. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, STAT, CHEST, and Academic Medicine.

Colleen received her BA in Women’s and Gender Studies from Williams College and her MD from Harvard Medical School. She trained in internal medicine at NYU and in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Weill Cornell. She also completed a fellowship in clinical ethics at Weill Cornell and earned the Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified designation from the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.

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