Faculty Expert Profile

Lisa Cooper is a general internist, social epidemiologist, and health services researcher. She studies how racism and socioeconomic factors shape patient care and health outcomes, how patients can become more active in improving their health, and how health systems can partner with communities to help populations with complex medical and social needs achieve health equity.

Cooper founded and currently directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, where she and her transdisciplinary team implement clinical trials, identifying interventions that alleviate racial and income disparities in social determinants and health outcomes, and translating these interventions into practice and policy changes and community health benefits. The Center has developed an active and engaged community advisory board, trained over 100 health equity researchers at Johns Hopkins, developed massive open online courses taken by more than 7,000 public health professionals globally, and shared influential new knowledge through published research papers, expert testimony at federal level, and numerous presentations, interviews, and media articles.

Cooper currently leads projects in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa that investigate whether system improvements and team-based care models can help reduce disparities in cardiovascular risk factors including hypertension, diabetes, and depression, among adult populations.