Bobye List Receives 2025 American Cancer Society Pathfinder in Palliative Care Award
The Kornfeld Foundation is proud to celebrate Bobye List, former Executive Director of the Kornfeld Foundation, as the 2025 recipient of the American Cancer Society’s Pathfinder in Palliative Care Award. The award was presented at the 18th and final Annual Kathleen Foley Palliative Care Retreat and Research Symposium, held October 6–8, 2025. Bobye’s leadership, vision, and commitment shaped modern palliative care research and strengthened a national community that continues to expand in impact and ambition.
A Vision Rooted in Curiosity, Humility, and Community
In accepting the award, Bobye reflected on her earliest lessons in listening, partnership, and curiosity — learned as a young girl fishing with her father in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta. Those experiences, she shared, taught her to seek out guides, honor local expertise, and approach every endeavor with humility, joy, and discovery.
That philosophy guided her leadership of the Kornfeld Foundation and her decades-long partnership with the palliative care community:
“I always wanted to learn and be taught by people who know better than I do. I relied on the experts to guide me, to teach me, and to include me in their world of discovery.”
Catalyzing the Field of Palliative Care Research
When Bobye joined the Foundation in 2000, palliative care research was very much an emerging movement. With strategic insight and unwavering belief in the field’s potential, she brought together a group of visionary leaders — including Dr. Diane Meier, Dr. Kathleen Foley, and the late Dr. James Block — and partnered with Dr. Sean Morrison, who would go on to become a defining leader in the field.
Together, they planned what would become the National Palliative Care Research Center (NPCRC). Kornfeld provided essential planning support and sustained long-term investment that enabled NPCRC to train future leaders, attract significant funding, support innovative science, and build a robust community of clinician-investigators.
Reflecting on this legacy, Bobye shared:
“We believed that while we were a small foundation, we could leverage our impact by taking a risk — doing something bold — and making an example for others to follow.”
A Moment of Transition and Expansion
2025 marks both a culmination and a beginning for palliative care research. As Dr. Morrison noted in his opening remarks at the retreat, this extraordinary research community stands at an inflection point. The work of NPCRC will soon become part of ASCENT, a newly launched national palliative care research consortium funded through a five-year, $64M National Institute on Aging award — expanding the work Bobye helped set in motion and supporting a new generation of researchers.