Lisa Cooper is an international thought leader on addressing health disparities. She examines the ways race and socioeconomic factors shape patient care, and the ways patients and health systems, in partnership with communities, can improve outcomes for populations experiencing health disparities. 

A Liberian-born general internist, social epidemiologist, and health services researcher, Cooper founded and currently directs The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, where she and her transdisciplinary team collaborate with multi-sector partners to implement rigorous clinical trials, identifying interventions that alleviate racial and income disparities in social determinants and health outcomes and translating these interventions into concrete policy changes and community health benefits.  The Center has successfully completed multiple research studies, developed an active and engaged community advisory board, trained a new generation of health equity researchers, and shared influential new knowledge through published research papers, expert testimony at federal level, and numerous presentations, interviews, and media articles. Cooper is currently heading 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. 

Cooper is the author of Why Are Health Disparities Everyone’s Problem?, which reveals how health disparities are crippling our health care system and society, driving up health care costs, leading to adverse health outcomes and ultimately an enormous burden of human suffering, and shows how we can work together to eliminate the injustices that plague our health care system and society. The book is part of the Johns Hopkins Wavelengths series. 

Cooper came to Johns Hopkins University as a postdoctoral researcher and joined the faculty in 1994. She was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in 2017.