Physician Investigator (Cl) General Internal Medicine, Mass General Research Institute

Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School

Physician Medicine-General Internal Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital

MD Harvard Medical School 1978

counseling; e-cigarettes; homeless persons; homelessness; nicotine; smoking; smoking cessation; tobacco smoke pollution; tobacco treatment; tobacco use disorder

Nancy Rigotti, MD, is an academic general internist at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Massachusetts General Hospital. She completed her residency in primary care internal medicine and her research training in a general medicine fellowship.

Dr. Rigotti founded and directs Mass General’s Tobacco Research and Treatment Center, which combines an internally-funded clinical service providing state-of-the-art smoking cessation treatment with an externally-funded research group that develops and tests smoking treatment interventions for health care settings.

Within general medicine, Dr. Rigotti’s research, teaching, and clinical innovation have been in preventive medicine, with a focus on tobacco use. Her work aims to reduce smoking prevalence in order to reduce the burden of tobacco-related morbidity and mortality. She uses a multidisciplinary approach, combining efforts to change individual behavior with community and policy interventions to influence individuals’ decisions about starting or continuing to smoke.

Dr. Rigotti does clinical research to identify new treatment methods and health services research to evaluate the implementation of effective treatment methods to health care settings. Since 1979, she has advocated that physicians take a more active role in treating their patients’ tobacco use.

She is involved locally and nationally: at Mass General, she is an associate chief in the Division of General Internal Medicine; at HMS, she serves on the Dean’s Primary Care Advisory Group, and served as Course Director of the HMS Preventive Medicine and Nutrition course for many years; and within Partners HealthCare, she chairs the Tobacco Task Force (quality improvement team). In additions, she was president of the Society for Research in Nicotine and Tobacco in 2003-4.

A second focus for Dr. Rigotti is women’s health and women’s careers in medicine. She was a founding member of Mass General Women’s Health Associates, one of the nation’s first women’s health practices.