Leah is a PhD candidate at the Columbia University School of Nursing. Her research interests are in palliative care and health disparities. Leah’s dissertation research will explore racial/ethnic and nursing home setting differences in palliative care services provided and its associations with potentially avoidable hospitalizations at end-of-life. Her findings will contribute to achieving health equity by first identifying the palliative care health disparities in nursing homes. Before starting in the PhD program, she worked as an intensive care unit nurse, caring for a diverse racial and ethnic patient population. Many of her patients were approaching the end-of-life, yet there was an underutilization of palliative care in her unit. This fueled her desire to pursue a career as a nurse scientist to work towards achieving health equity and improving the delivery of palliative care for all patients, not only the ones she had the privilege of serving personally.