Camara Phyllis Jones, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D.

Camara Phyllis Jones, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D.
Research Director on Social Determinants
of Health and Equity
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Atlanta, Georgia

Camara Phyllis Jones, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., is research director on social determinants of health and equity in the Division of Adult and Community Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP). Dr. Jones received her B.A. degree (Molecular Biology) from Wellesley College, her M.D. from the Stanford University School of Medicine, and both her M.P.H. and Ph.D. (Epidemiology) degrees from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. She also completed residency training in general preventive medicine (Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland) and in family practice (Residency Program in Social Medicine, Bronx, New York).

Dr. Jones is a family physician and epidemiologist whose work focuses on the impact of racism on the health and wellbeing 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). As a methodologist, she has developed new ways for comparing full distributions of data (rather than 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 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.

Dr. Jones was an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health from 1994 to 2000, and is currently an adjunct associate professor at both the Morehouse School of Medicine and the Rollins School of Public Health. She is a member of the World Health Organization’s Scientific Resource Group on Equity and Health and the National Board of Public Health Examiners, and recently completed service on the Executive Board of the American Public Health Association, the board of directors of the American College of Epidemiology, and the board of directors of the National Black Women’s Health Project.