Dr Claudia Virdun is an experienced specialist palliative care nurse interested in enabling optimal care for people with advanced serious illness, irrespective of care setting. Claudia’s passion for excellence in palliative care has seen her focus on varied clinical experiences combined with research and improvement work to inform service change. This deep professional experience coupled with emerging research capabilities enables Claudia to take a holistic, practical and critical “end to end” approach to research that is well informed by current issues from clinical and health workforce perspectives, is innovative, relevant and able to “cut through” to drive successful improvements in care delivery. Claudia completed her doctoral studies in 2021 focused on enabling optimal inpatient palliative care. Her postdoctoral research is focused on how to enable patients with palliative care needs, and their families / carers to provide feedback about the quality of care received to facilitate improvement based on what matters most for people nearing the end of their lives. In addition to this research work, Claudia contributes to workforce development as a member of the teaching team for the suite of postgraduate palliative care topics offered at Flinders University. The combination of workforce skill development and focused clinical improvement work seeks to enable patients and families across Australia to received optimal and evidence-informed palliative and end-of-life care, wherever they may be located.