Maria J. Silveira is an internist, health services researcher, and ethicist. Her clinical interest is in palliative care and her research interests are palliative care, medical ethics, and GIS health services. She received her BA in biochemistry from Harvard University in 1991 and her MA in Medical Ethics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1995, with a thesis entitled Terminal Illness and Criteria for Physician-Assisted Death. She received her MD from SUNY Stony Brook School of Medicine in 1996, and an MPH from the University of Washington in 2001. She is an Associate Professor in Geriatric and Palliative Medicine at the University of Michigan. She has published research regarding public and physician knowledge about laws governing end of life, the geography of death, and how elderly women make decisions about end-of-life care. Her current research includes several studies to explore access to palliative care through primary care and hospice. Her theoretical work focuses on the ethics of pain management. In 2003, she was chosen to be a Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Scholar, and was a VA Career Development Award recipient in 2004.