Philip A. Pizzo

Philip A. Pizzo (born December 1944) is an American professor, physician, and scientist. He is the David and Susan Heckerman Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Emeritus at Stanford University, and founding director of Stanford's Distinguished Careers Institute. He served as the 11th Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine from 2001 to 2012. He spent over two decades at the National Institutes of Health, and has devoted much of his medical career to the diagnosis, management, prevention and treatment of children with cancer and AIDS. He has also focused on the future of higher education, specifically for individuals in mid- to late-life. In 2022, he enrolled as a rabbinical student at the Academy for Jewish Religion, California. In 2024 he enrolled in the Program in Spiritual Care and Counseling at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Early life Pizzo was born and raised in The Bronx, New York, into a first-generation Sicilian immigrant family. Pizzo received an MA in Spiritual Care and Chaplaincy in 2026.

Career Following medical school Pizzo completed an internship and residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston. In 1976, after his fellowship ended, he was appointed to work at NIH as an investigator in pediatric oncology in the US Public Health Service. At the time of his appointment, NCI focused on cancer, but Pizzo realized the focus should also be on HIV, as the AIDS epidemic had begun to unfold, and he influenced the NIH leaders to take on the care of pediatric HIV cases, developing new approaches to treating and preventing AIDS in children. His focus during those years was mainly on education, ultimately playing a lead role in the authorization of the Children's Hospital Graduate Medical Education (GME) Program.

In 2013 Pizzo created the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI), serving as its founding director, and was also named the David and Susan Heckerman Professor of Pediatrics and of Microbiology and Immunology through 2022. The Stanford DCI provides an opportunity for individuals in mid- and later life to return to higher education.

Pizzo is credited with leading the initiative in the late 1990s to secure federal funding for resident training in children's hospitals, which is roughly $300 million per year. He and his wife, Peggy Pizzo, helped establish The Children's Inn at the NIH, which houses the families of children being treated at NCI. and Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life (2016). From 2019 - 2022, Pizzo served as co-chair of the National Academy of Medicine Initiative on Climate and Human Health. In 2025 Pizzo began work as a volunteer in Spiritual Care Chaplaincy, focused on patients in skilled nursing centers.

Personal life Pizzo married Peggy Daly in 1967, who worked in early childhood education and public policy and served as a senior scholar in Stanford's School of Education. International Immunocompromised Host Society Lifetime Achievement Award, 2021

Books Pizzo is the author of 650 scientific articles and review articles, and the editor or co-editor of 16 books and monographs, including:

Principles and practice of pediatric oncology (First edition, 1989; seventh edition, 2016, Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer) with David Poplack. Subsequent edits are published as Pizzo and Poplack's Pediatric Oncology. Pediatric AIDS: The Challenge of HIV Infection in Infants, Children, and Adolescents (First edition, 1991; third edition, 1999, Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins) with Catherine Wilfert Be a Friend: Children Who Live With HIV Speak (1994, Albert Whitman & Co) with Lori Wiener and Aprille Best