Camara Phyllis Jones, MD, MPH, PhD is a family physician, epidemiologist, and past president of the American Public Health Association whose work focuses on naming, measuring, and addressing the impacts of racism on the health and well-being of our nation and the world. Her allegories on "race" and racism are celebrated for illuminating topics that are otherwise difficult for many Americans to understand or discuss: that racism exists, racism is a system, racism saps the strength of the whole society, and we can act to dismantle racism.
Dr. Jones taught six years as an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, developing the school’s first course on “Race” and Racism, and served fourteen years as a medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), leading the development of the six-question Reactions to “Race” module for use on CDC’s surveillance systems.
As President of the American Public Health Association (2016), she launched the association on a National Campaign Against Racism that catalyzed the first of what are now 262 declarations by local jurisdictions across 41 US states and the District of Columbia that “Racism is a public health crisis.”
She has since shared her expertise on “race,” racism, and anti-racism in extended residencies as a Radcliffe Fellow, Harvard University (2019-2020), Presidential Visiting Fellow, Yale School of Medicine (2021), Presidential Chair, University of California, San Francisco (2021-2022), and Leverhulme Visiting Professor in Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London (2022-2023), while continuing as an Adjunct Professor at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Morehouse School of Medicine.
She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the recently launched O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health.
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 Bloomberg School of Public Health. She also completed residency training in General Preventive Medicine (Johns Hopkins) and in Family Medicine (Montefiore Medical Center).