Ophelia Dahl DS ’94, co-founder of Partners In Health, and Camara Jones ’76, senior fellow at the Satcher Health Leadership Institute and Cardiovascular Research Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine, join President Paula A. Johnson in a conversation to discuss the prevalence and dire effects of racial and other global health disparities during this pandemic. This event is part of #WellesleyVotes. 

This event has ended. Please visit our YouTube channel to view the recording.

About the Panelists

Ophelia Dahl co-founded Partners In Health (PIH), a global health non-profit dedicated to delivering high-quality care to the poor. PIH, which began in Haiti’s rural Central Plateau, now serves millions of patients in ten countries on four continents around the world. PIH’s community-based model has helped to redefine what’s possible in health care delivery in settings of poverty, proving that HIV, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, and other diseases that stalk the poor can be effectively treated in communities from Peru to Rwanda to West Africa. Ms. Dahl led PIH as executive director for 16 years, and now chairs its Board of Directors. She continues to write, teach, and speak about the health and rights of the poor, moral imagination, and accompaniment.

Ms. Dahl also helps to lead the Roald Dahl Literary Estate, which manages the works of her late father, the writer Roald Dahl. She is a director’s fellow at the MIT Media Lab, and a trustee of Wellesley College, her alma mater. Ms. Dahl is a recipient of the Union Theological Seminary’s Union Medal and, together with her PIH colleagues, the Hilton Humanitarian prize. She lives in Cambridge with her family.

Camara Phyllis Jones, MD, MPH, PhD is a family physician, epidemiologist, and past president of the American Public Health Association, whose work focuses on naming, measuring, and addressing the impacts of racism on the health and well-being of the nation. Valued for her creativity and intellectual agility, 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). Her allegories on "race" and racism illuminate topics that are otherwise difficult for many Americans to understand or discuss.

Dr. Jones recently completed tenure as the 2019-2020 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Past roles include assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health (1994 to 2000); medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2000 to 2014); senior fellow at the Morehouse School of Medicine (2014 to present); and president of the American Public Health Association (2015 to 2016). She is also an adjunct professor at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University (2004 to present) and an adjunct associate professor at the Morehouse School of Medicine (2003 to present).