Camara Phyllis Jones

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 nations and the world. Her allegories on "race”, racism, and anti-racism are celebrated for illuminating topics that are otherwise difficult for many people 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 is currently a Commissioner on the three-year O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health; a Visiting Professor at King’s College London; 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.

Dr. Jones previously taught six years as an Assistant Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health (1994-2000) and served fourteen years as a Medical Officer at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2000-2014). 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 265 declarations that “Racism is a public health crisis” made by local jurisdictions (city councils, county commissions, state legislatures, other bodies) across 42 US states and the District of Columbia.

Since then, she has been invited to engage 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, King’s College London (2022-2023).

Among her many honors, Dr. Jones is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Medicine. She 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).