The Office of Health Equity Research (OHER), led by Associate Dean Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MHS, is thrilled to welcome Camara Phyllis Jones, MD, MPH, PhD as a Presidential Visiting Fellow for the spring semester. Dr. Jones is a family physician and epidemiologist whose work focuses on naming, measuring, and addressing the impacts of racism on the health and well-being of the nation.
Over the course of the semester Dr. Jones will present at an inaugural OHER Distinguished Visiting Professor Lecture and will speak at faculty and student-facing talks to bring discussions of health equity throughout the School. She will also speak at community-facing events and will lead professional development sessions with the National Clinician Scholars Program and the Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership. Dr. Jones will be available to the YSM community to think strategically about advancing health equity and anti-racism research practices.
Dr. Jones recently completed tenure as the 2019-2020 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her past roles include Assistant Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health in the Department of Health and Social Behavior, Department of Epidemiology, and Division of Public Health Practice (1994 to 2000); Medical Officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the Division of Adult and Community Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (Research Director on Social Determinants of Health and Equity, 2000 to 2010) and in the Division of Epidemiologic and Analytic Methods for Population Health, Office of Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Services (2010 to 2014); and President of the American Public Health Association (2015 to 2016).
At the CDC, Dr. Jones led the development and inclusion of the six-question “Reactions to Race” module on the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and the organization and formalization of the CDC Racism and Health Workgroup as an official CDC scientific workgroup. As President of the American Public Health Association, she launched the 25,000-member association and its 54 state affiliates (with another 25,000 members) on a National Campaign Against Racism.
She is currently a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Black Men and Black Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine; the National Board of Public Health Examiners; the Board of Directors of the DeKalb County [Georgia] Board of Health; and a faculty member of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s Quality Improvement: Health Care Disparities Collaborative.
Dr. Jones earned her BA in Molecular Biology from Wellesley College (1976); her MD from the Stanford University School of Medicine (1981); her Master of Public Health (1982) and her PhD in Epidemiology (1995) from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (now the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health). She completed residency training in General Preventive Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (1981 to 1983) and residency training in Family Practice at the Residency Program in Social Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center (1983 to 1986).