Anthony Back MD is Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington, founding co-director of the Cambia Palliative Care Center of Excellence, and co-founder of VitalTalk

 Dr. Anthony Back is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington, Division of Oncology. His research on patient-physician communication has been funded by the National Cancer Institute, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Arnold P Gold Foundation and many others. He co-founded VitalTalk as a 501c3 nonprofit with Dr. Robert Arnold and Dr. James Tulsky, to use a startup entrepreneurship approach to disseminating clinician-skills training for serious illness. He created the first online teaching videos of communication skills, authored the first smartphone teaching app for this purpose, and created the first video blog on this topic, at vitaltalkconversations.com. For over a decade he has been a senior teacher at the Upaya Institute’s Being with Dying contemplative practice program. Currently, he is the principal investigator for Message Lab, a national initiative funded by the John A Hartford Foundation and the Cambia Health Foundation, to create aligned public messaging for serious illness care. His newest project is the Message Lab Toolkit, found at seriousillnessmessaging.org.