Dr. Paul Haidet is a general internist, health-services researcher, educator, husband, father, and lover of jazz music. His current interest is in the improvisational aspects of patient-physician communication, and he is using his lifelong interest in jazz to create new educational methods and models to foster advanced communication skills among physicians at multiple levels.

He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Penn State University, and completed a residency in internal medicine at the Milton S Hershey Medical Center and Penn State University Hospital. He then pursued the Harvard Faculty Development Fellowship in General Internal Medicine at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and completed his Masters in Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. After that, he joined the faculty of the Baylor College of Medicine, and was a member of the Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence at the Michael E DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston Texas. After 11 years at Baylor, Dr Haidet and his wife Mary Lynn Fecile, a pediatric oncologist, relocated back to Penn State, where he inaugurated the role of Director of Medical Education Research and serves as Professor of Medicine, Humanities, and Public Health Sciences at the Penn State College of Medicine.

Dr Haidet has published widely on a variety of topics related to teaching, communication, and the humanistic care of patients, and he has won a number of regional, national, and international awards for his work.