Dr. Brooke Cunningham is a physician-sociologist and a postdoctoral fellow in General Internal Medicine and the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. She received her undergraduate degree in history and African-American and African Studies from the University of Virginia and her doctorate in sociology and medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She trained in internal medicine at Duke University Medical Center. During her postdoctoral fellowship at Hopkins, she completed the Greenwall Fellowship in Bioethics and Health Policy, and has also been a fellow in the Hopkins Center to Eliminate Cardiovascular Health Disparities. Dr. Cunningham uses mixed methods to examine associations between the contexts of health care delivery and the care of diverse populations. Her current work links clinical uncertainty to the use of race in medical decision-making, and describes the relationship between organizational orientations to quality, patient-centeredness, and cultural competency and efforts to address health care disparities. She plans to extend this research by examining domains hypothesized to influence an organization’s “readiness” to reduce health care disparities and, therefore, the implementation of interventions to improve equity.
Dr. Cunningham was a 2013 AcademyHealth Delivery System Science Fellow. Her host site was the Medica Research Institute.