Camara Jones: the Gardener’s Tale and the Physician’s Legitimate Role

Dr. Jones’ allegories bring to life the complex connections among health and wellbeing, social determinants of health, social determinants of equity, population-level interventions, and the role of health professionals.

Camara Phyllis Jones is research director on social determinants of health and equity in the Division of Adult and Community Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP). Dr. Jones is a family physician and epidemiologist whose work focuses on the impact of racism on the health and wellbeing of the nation.

She seeks to broaden the national health debate to include not only universal access to high quality health care but also attention to the social determinants of health (including poverty) and the social determinants of equity (including racism).

As a methodologist, she has developed new ways for comparing full distributions of data (rather than means or proportions) in order to investigate population-level risk factors and propose population-level interventions. As a social epidemiologist, her work on race-associated differences in health outcomes goes beyond documenting those differences to vigorously investigating the structural causes of the differences.

As a teacher, her allegories on race and racism illuminate topics that are otherwise difficult for many Americans to understand or discuss.