Speaker Profile

Camara Phyllis Jones, MD, MPH, PhD 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 is a past president of the American Public Health Association, a senior fellow at the Morehouse School of Medicine, and an adjunct professor at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. She was a Radcliffe Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University from 2019-2020

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 conversation on racism that will mobilize and engage all Americans in a National Campaign Against Racism.

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.  Highly valued as a mentor and teacher, she is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Morehouse School of Medicine.