Lisa Cooper

Lisa A. Cooper (born 1963) is an internal medicine and public health physician, and the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Equity in Health and Healthcare at Johns Hopkins University, jointly appointed in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and in the departments of Health, Behavior and Society, Health Policy and Management; Epidemiology; and International Health in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the James F. Fries Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, and Director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute. Dr. Cooper is also a Gilman Scholar and a core faculty member in the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research. She is internationally recognized for her research on the impact of race, ethnicity and gender on the patient-physician relationship and subsequent health disparities. In 2007, she received a MacArthur Fellowship ”genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
Biography.
Dr. Cooper was born in Liberia, West Africa, to a mother who is a librarian, and a physician father. She attended the American Cooperative School in Liberia until tenth grade, and the International School of Geneva, in Switzerland, for her last two years of high school before moving to the United States to attend college. She graduated from Emory University with a B.A. in chemistry in 1984 and from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine with an M.D., in 1988. After completing her internship and residency in internal medicine at the University of Maryland Medical System, she became board certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in 1991. She then went to Johns Hopkins University, where she obtained an M.P.H. in 1993. There, she completed a general internal medicine fellowship the following year before joining the university faculty.
In 2011, Governor Martin O'Malley created the Maryland Health Care Quality and Costs Council through an executive order, and Dr. Cooper was appointed as co-chair of its Cultural Competency Workgroup. Dr. Cooper has testified in congressional hearings in support of funding for health disparities research, equity in healthcare delivery, and diversity and inclusion in the healthcare workforce. In 2019, Dr. Cooper testified at the Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on "Investing in America's Health Care" in support of reauthorizing the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity
Dr. Cooper is the founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity (originally called the Johns Hopkins Center to Eliminate Cardiovascular Health Disparities). The Center, established in 2010, uses a comprehensive strategy to promote equity in health and health care for vulnerable populations: it advances scientific knowledge, educates and trains scholars, engages and partners with communities, raises public awareness of health inequities, and advocates for changes in clinical practice and policy. The Center has made strides towards realizing the goal of health equity in Baltimore and serves as a model for community-academic partnerships in other urban areas, across the country and globally, plagued by similar health disparities.
Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute (UHI)
Dr. Cooper was appointed as the director of the UHI in April 2020, just as racial disparities in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths from the novel coronavirus were becoming more evident in the US. Dr. Cooper is executing a new vision for the institute's future as a vital partner in the health of Baltimore City. The mission of the UHI is to advance health and health equity in Baltimore by: facilitating collaborations between communities, universities, and healthcare delivery systems to build collective capacity for achieving health equity in Baltimore; mobilizing resources in support of promising strategies to achieve substantial gains in the health and well-being of Baltimore residents; and advancing understanding and dialogue by including community voices to build trust and enhance pathways to health, well-being, and social justice in Baltimore.
Research.
Dr. Cooper’s research has focused on the physician-patient relationship and how race and ethnicity factor into the quality of patient care. The interventions she has tested include patient-centered strategies to overcome racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare. She has pioneered approaches for reducing healthcare disparities among minority populations through culturally tailored education programs and patient-centered communication training. Her most highly cited paper is a 1999 article in the "Journal of the American Medical Association" (JAMA) that analyzed the role race plays in the patient-physician relationship. The study demonstrated that minority patients found that their physicians involved them in the decision-making process at lower levels than non-minorities did, and that patients seeing physicians of their own race also rated the decision-making process as more participatory than patients seeing physicians of another race. The first of its kind, this study revealed that differences in the relationship between the patient and physician may be a key factor underlying the already established inequitable quality of health care based on a person's race and ethnicity. Dr. Cooper’s research contributed greatly to two paradigm shifts in healthcare research: patient-centeredness and health disparities. Her research documented the existence of disparities in the quality of medical communication experienced by African Americans and other ethnic minorities compared to whites, and the contribution of implicit racial bias and stereotyping behaviors among physicians to poorer communication in the visits of African American patients. Her interventions have identified the important role of patient activation and engagement in treatment decisions in reducing disparities in health care quality for chronic conditions.
Publications.
Cooper has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles in top journals, including "JAMA", Annals of Internal Medicine the "American Journal of Epidemiology", the "American Journal of Public Health", "Medical Care", and the "Journal of General Internal Medicine". She has an h-index of 82. She was named "Highly Cited" by Thomson Reuters in 2014 and 2015.