Caroline Variath is a third-year PhD candidate, collaborative in nursing and bioethics, at the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto. She has worked clinically in acute and critical care settings for over 15 years. The challenges she encountered in her practice to provide a peaceful death, especially to those with loss of decision-making capacity, made her passionate about improving end-of-life care. Her PhD thesis focuses on experiences with the loss of capacity to consent and access to medical assistance in dying in Canada.

Through her work, she aims to normalize the concept of death and to improve end-of-life care planning and the experiences of the patients, their family members and healthcare providers with death.