The Department of Health Policy and Management proudly announces that on March 1, Dr. Thomas LaVeist joined the Department as Professor and Chair after serving 25 years on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where he was the William C. and Nancy F. Richardson Professor in Health Policy and Director of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, his doctorate degree in medical sociology from the University of Michigan and postdoctoral fellowship in gerontology and Health Management & Policy at the Michigan School of Public Health.
He is the creator of the COA360 (Cultural-Competency Organizational Assessment – 360), a web-based tool used by hospitals and other healthcare organizations to assess their cultural competence. He also created the PATH (Patient Assessment of Total Health), a web-based tool to assess patient experience in patient centered medical homes and other primary care settings.
Dr. LaVeist has published more than 100 articles in scientific journals. In addition to his scholarly writing, Dr. LaVeist has written articles for Newsweek Magazine, Black Enterprise Magazine, and the Baltimore Sun. He is a highly sought after lecturer at leading universities, corporations, professional conferences and workshops. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, Center for Disease Control, Department of Defense, Commonwealth Fund, Sage Foundation and the Agency for Healthcare Research. In 2012 he organized and hosted the International Conference on Health in the African Diaspora, which brought together health advocates from 24 countries in the Western Hemisphere.
Dr. LaVeist has provided consultation services for numerous federal agencies and healthcare organizations on minority health and cultural competency issues and racial disparities in health. His dissertation on racial disparities in infant mortality was awarded the 1989 Roberta G. Simmons Outstanding Dissertation Award by the American Sociological Association. He is the recipient of the “Innovation Award” from the National Institutes of Health, and the “Knowledge Award” from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health. In 2013 he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (formally Institute of Medicine).
The second edition of his edited volume, Race, Ethnicity and Health: A Public Health Reader (Jossey-Bass Publishers) was published fall 2012. His textbook, Minority Populations and Health: An Introduction to Race, Ethnicity and Health in the United States, (Jossey-Bass) was published in 2005. He is also the author of The DayStar Guide to Colleges for African American Students (Stanly Kaplan/Simon and Schuster), and co-author of “8 Steps to Help Black Families Pay for College (Princeton Review/Random House). His most recent book project, Legacy of the Crossing: Slavery, Race, and Contemporary Health in the African Diaspora, is planned for publication in 2017.