Dr. Charon has written and lectured extensively on literature’s salience to medical practice as well as on the doctor-patient relationship, empathy in medicine, narrative competence, narrative ethics, and the late novels of Henry James. Dr. Charon’s research has focused on communication between doctors and patients, seeking ways to improve the ability of doctors to understand what their patients go through. She inaugurated the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia in 1996 to increase Columbia’s effectiveness in teaching the narrative skills of clinical imagination, empathy, and ethical discernment to health professionals and trainees. She has designed and directed medical education programs at Columbia in medical interviewing and medical humanities and conducts outcomes research to document the effectiveness of training programs in narrative aspects of medicine. Dr. Charon has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residence, and achievement awards from the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American College of Physicians, the Society for Health and Human Values, and the Society of General Internal Medicine. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Institutes of Health, the New York Council for the Humanities, and many private foundations. She is co-editor of Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics (Routledge, 2002), author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness published by Oxford University Press in 2006, and co-editor of Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine (SUNY Press, in press). She is working on a book on Henry James.