Camara Phyllis Jones, MD, MPH, PhD is the 2019-2020 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the 144th President of the American Public Health Association (2016). She 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. She seeks to broaden the national health debate to include not only universal access to high quality health care, but also attention to the social determinants of health (including poverty) and the social determinants of equity (including racism).
Dr. Jones is a public health leader valued for her creativity and intellectual agility. As a methodologist, she has developed new methods for comparing full distributions of data, rather than simply comparing means or proportions, in order to investigate population-level risk factors and propose population-level interventions. As a social epidemiologist, her work on "race"-associated differences in health outcomes goes beyond simply documenting those differences to vigorously investigating the structural causes of the differences. As a teacher, her allegories on "race" and racism illuminate topics that are otherwise difficult for many Americans to understand or discuss. She aims through her work to catalyze a National Campaign Against Racism that will mobilize and engage all Americans.
Dr. Jones was an Assistant Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health (1994 to 2000) before being recruited to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2000 to 2014), where she served as a Medical Officer and Research Director on Social Determinants of Health and Equity. Most recently, she was a Senior Fellow at the Satcher Health Leadership Institute and the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine (2013 to 2019). She has been elected to service on many professional boards, including her current service on the Board of Directors of the DeKalb County (Georgia) Board of Health and the National Board of Public Health Examiners.
She is also actively sought as a contributor to national efforts to eliminate health disparities and achieve health equity, including as a faculty member of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s Pursuing Excellence in the Clinical Learning Environment collaborative addressing Health Care Disparities, as a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Black Men and Black Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and as a Project Advisor and on-screen expert for the groundbreaking film series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?
Highly valued as a mentor and teacher, she is also an Adjunct Professor at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Morehouse School of Medicine. Her honors include the Wellesley Alumnae Achievement Award (Wellesley College’s highest alumnae honor, 2018), the John Snow Award (given in recognition of “enduring contributions to public health through epidemiologic methods and practice” by the American Public Health Association’s Epidemiology Section, 2011), and awards named after luminaries David Satcher (2003), Hildrus A. Poindexter (2009), Paul Cornely (2016), Shirley Nathan Pulliam (2016), Louis Stokes (2018), Frances Borden-Hubbard (2018), and Cato T. Laurencin (2018).
Dr. Jones earned her BA in Molecular Biology from Wellesley College, her MD from the Stanford University School of Medicine, and both her Master of Public Health and her PhD in Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. She also completed residency training in General Preventive Medicine at Johns Hopkins and in Family Practice at the Residency Program in Social Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center.
