Lisa Cooper

Lisa A. Cooper (born 1963) is a public health physician, and a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Equity in Health and Healthcare at Johns Hopkins University. She is the James F. Fries Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Vice President of Health Care Equity and Director of the Center for Health Equity in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is also a core faculty member in the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research and the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. She holds joint appointments in the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and in the departments of Health Policy and Management; Epidemiology; and Health, Behavior and Society in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Cooper is also a Gilman Scholar. She is internationally recognized for her research on the impact of race, ethnicity and gender on the patient-physician relationship and subsequent health disparities.

Lisa was born in Liberia, West Africa, to a mother who was a reference librarian, and a physician father. She attended an international school in Liberia until tenth grade, and an international boarding school in Geneva, Switzerland, for her last two years of high school before moving to the United States to attend university. She graduated from Emory University with a B.A. in chemistry in 1984 and from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine with an M.D., in 1988. She became board certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in 1991. She then went to Johns Hopkins University, where she obtained an M.P.H. in 1993. There, she completed a general internal medicine fellowship the following year before joining the university faculty.

In 2011, Governor Martin O'Malley created the Maryland Health Care Quality and Costs Council through an executive order, and Cooper was appointed as co-chair of its Cultural Competency Workgroup. In 2019, Cooper testified at the Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on "Investing in America's Health Care" in support of reauthorizing the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).

Lisa Cooper’s research has focused on the physician-patient relationship and how gender, ethnicity, and race factor into patient care. Her work focuses on patient-centered strategies to overcome racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare. She has pioneered approaches for reducing healthcare disparities among minority populations through culturally tailored education programs and patient-centered communication training. Her most impactful paper was a 1999 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that analyzed the role ethnicity plays in the patient-physician relationship. The study demonstrated that minority patients found that their physicians did not involve them in the decision-making process, whereas non-minorities found that their physicians did include them in their medical decisions, and that patients seeing physicians of their own race also rated the decision-making process as more participatory. The first of its kind, this study revealed that differences in the relationship between the patient and physician may be a key factor underlying the already established unequal quality on health care based on a person's race and ethnicity. Further, Cooper has found that including patients in treatment decisions leads to higher success rates of health care interventions.

• 2005 Election to the American Society of Clinical Investigation
• 2007 MacArthur Fellows Program
• 2008 Election to the National Academy of Medicine
• 2009 Named Fellow of the American College of Physicians
• 2014 Herbert W. Nickens Award by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)
• 2017 Helen Rodriguez-Trìas Social Justice Award by the American Public Health Association

Cooper has published more than 130 peer-reviewed articles in top journals, including JAMA, the American Journal of Epidemiology, the American Journal of Public Health, Medical Care, and the Journal of General Internal Medicine. She has an h-index of 82. She was named "Highly Cited" by Thomson Reuters in 2014.

Highly Cited Articles

• 2004, RL Johnson, D Roter, NR Powe, and LA Cooper, Patient race/ethnicity and quality of patient-physician communication during medical visits, in American Journal of Public Health. Vol. 94 nº12, 2084-2090.
• 2003, LE Boulware, LA Cooper, LE Ratner, TA LaVeist, and NR Powe, Race and trust in the leath care system, in Public Health Reports. Vol. 118 nº4, 358-365.
• 2005, MC Beach, EG Price, TL Gary, KA Robinson, A Gozu, A Palacio, C Smarth, MW Jenckes, C Feuerstein, EB Bass, NR Powe, LA Cooper, Cultural competence: a systematic review of health care provider educational interventions, in Medical Care. Vol. 43 nº4, 356-373.
• 2003, LA Cooper, DL Roter, RL Johnson, DE Ford, DM Steinwachs, NR Powe, Patient-centered communication, ratings of care, and concordance of patient and physician race. Vol. 139 nº11, 907-915.
• 1999, L Cooper-Patrick, JJ Gallo, JJ Gonzales, HT Vu, NR Powe, C Nelson, DE Ford, Race, gender, and partnership in the patient-physician relationship, in JAMA, Vol. 282 nº6, 583-589.