Mary Catherine Beach is a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She holds a joint appointment in health, behavior and society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Beach is a former Greenwall fellow (Bioethics and Health Policy), health policy fellow in the office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar Award.
Dr. Beach’s scholarship about respect and relationships in healthcare encompasses both empirical and conceptual dimensions. Dr. Beach’s empirical work has focused primarily on respect and communication between patients and clinicians. For the last several years, most of Dr. Beach’s research has centered on people living with HIV/AIDS and sickle cell disease (SCD). Her empirical work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Greenwall Foundation. Dr. Beach is on the editorial board for Patient Education and Counseling and on the Advisory Board for Communication in Medicine.
She is a 2018 grantee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Building Trust and Mutual Respect to Improve Health program, managed by AcademyHealth.