Professor Camara Phyllis Jones

Camara Phyllis Jones, MD, MPH, PhD is a family physician and epidemiologist who is currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine. Her work focuses on naming, measuring, and addressing the impacts of racism on the health and well-being of the United States and the world.

Camara taught for six years as an Assistant Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and served for fourteen years as a Medical Officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As President of the American Public Health Association (2016), she launched the association on a National Campaign Against Racism with three tasks: to name racism, ask how racism is operating there, and organise and strategise to act. Her presidential initiative catalysed the first of over 250 declarations by local jurisdictions across 43 US states and the District of Columbia that ‘Racism is a public health crisis.’

Her counsel has been sought on many advisory bodies, including most recently the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)’s Committee on Advancing Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in STEMM Organizations and the recently launched O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health.

Camara is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Medicine. She is also an honorary member of the Royal Society of Public Health, and a member of the NASEM Roundtable on Black Men and Black Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

She was a key scientific advisor for the award-winning PBS film series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?.

Camara 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 completed residency training in General Preventive Medicine at Johns Hopkins and in Family Medicine at the Residency Program in Social Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center.

Faculty positions held

• Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University (2019-20)
• Presidential Visiting Fellow at the Yale School of Medicine (2021)
• UCSF Presidential Chair at the University of California, San Francisco (2021-22)
• Adjunct Professor at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University
• Senior Fellow and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Morehouse School of Medicine

Other honours

• Stanford University President’s Award for the Advancement of the Common Good (2022)
• Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award (2018)
• National Medical Association’s Scroll of Merit (2022) in recognition of her lifelong career as a family physician, educator, epidemiologist, and exemplary leader
• John Snow Award (2011), awarded jointly by the Epidemiology Section of the American Public Health Association and the Royal Society of Public Health
• 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), Cato T. Laurencin (2018), and Wyatt Tee Walker (2021)

Boards and advisory committees served on

• National Board of Public Health Examiners,
• Board of Directors of the DeKalb County (Georgia) Board of Health
• Executive Board of the American Public Health Association
• Board of Directors of the American College of Epidemiology
• Board of Directors of the National Black Women’s Health Project (now the Black Women’s Health Imperative)