Dr. April Joy Damian is an epidemiologist, health services researcher, and classically trained public health professional with expertise in health equity, social determinants of health, psychiatric epidemiology, and mixed methods. She currently serves as the Vice President and Director of the Weitzman Institute, a research, education, and policy center dedicated to quality improvement and primary care transformation, with a particularly focus on vulnerable populations. Dr. Damian concurrently serves as a Senior Scholar for Health Equity at AcademyHealth, and holds faculty appointments at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Wesleyan University. She provides thought leadership on numerous national committees, including as an appointed Member of the National Academies Board on Children, Youth, and Families, Forum for Children's Well-Being, Member of the Committee on Advocacy and Public Policy (CAPP) and Membership Committee at AcademyHealth, and inaugural Vice-Chair of the Health Equity/Patient Reported Outcomes/Community Engagement Committee of NIH's RECOVER initiative. Dr. Damian previously served as the Director of Quality Innovation at the National Quality Forum (NQF), where she spearheaded the expansion of NQF’s portfolio on social determinants of health quality measures, and co-led the NQF Measure Incubator®, an innovative effort that facilitates efficient measure development and testing through collaboration and partnership, and addresses important aspects of care for which quality measures are underdeveloped or non-existent.
Dr. Damian completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Masters in Medical Sciences at Harvard Medical School. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelors of Arts in Ethnic Studies, Highest Honors. She has received numerous recognitions in honor of her role as a social change agent, including the Harry S. Truman Scholarship, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Community Well-Being Warrior Award, and an honorarium from the University of Delaware.