Sara Johnson

Professor in Pediatric Population Health and Health Equity Research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Image previewSara Johnson, PhD, MPH is Blanket Fort Foundation Professor in Pediatric Population Health and Health Equity Research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She also holds joint appointments in the Department of Population, Family of Reproductive Health, and the Department of Mental Health in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research aims to describe and explain the complex biological and social mechanisms through which early life experiences, particularly adversities, shape health, behavior, and belonging across the life course and across generations. As Director of the Ruth and Norman Rales Center for the Integration of Health and Education, Dr. Johnson works with a multidisciplinary team of researchers, educators, and clinicians to redesign school-based health programs to reduce health and educational inequality in Baltimore. Her work is distinguished by its interdisciplinarity, leveraging tools and frameworks from neuroscience, developmental psychology, genetics, prevention science, sociology, and health policy. She received her doctoral degree in Health Policy and Management from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at UCSF and UC Berkeley before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 2007.