Samara Gordon Wexler is an MD candidate at Harvard Medical School, passionate about advancing equitable end-of-life care through global collaboration, narrative medicine, and community-centered care. She graduated summa cum laude from Middlebury College with a degree in English, thesis honors for her poetry collection, and election to Phi Beta Kappa.

At Middlebury, believing that stories shape care systems, Samara founded MiddS.P.E.A.K., an organization that amplifies the voices of those struggling with disordered eating to promote education and action. This led to her selection for a Vermont DPH and Mellon Foundation-supported initiative, where she co-designed evidence-based health curricula for high school students across Addison County.

Spurred by the person-centered ethos she was forming at Middlebury, Samara joined the Wolfe Lab for pediatric palliative care at Dana-Farber, where she became increasingly interested in the overmedicalization of death in the United States. Named a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, she spent one year traveling across six countries and exploring what it means to die well in different cultural and medical contexts. Her experiences ranged from community-based palliative care alongside the WHO-recognized Pallium India to apprenticing at a fantasy coffin carpentry workshop in Ghana.

Samara’s scholarship has been published in JPSM, The Journal of Pediatric Surgery, Palliative Care and Social Practice, and the EndWell Companion Journal. She has also trained as a death doula. Samara’s mission is to ensure palliative care is recognized and practiced as a human right, from expanding access to morphine globally to redesigning systems of end-of-life care in the U.S. that maximize autonomy.

Samara is the middle of three sisters who are her biggest role models. She is an avid writer (which she gets from her Mom), an ice hockey fan (which she gets from her dad), and she enjoys skiing, sailing, hiking, and cooking for her friends and family.