In her role as an Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute, Dr. Purnell co-leads the institute’s efforts to facilitate and recognize collaborations between communities, universities, healthcare delivery systems, government, and the private sector to build collective capacity for achieving health equity in Baltimore. She is also the Associate Director for Education and Training at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, where she leads the center’s award-winning educational and training programs for public health, nursing, and medical scholars working to advance health equity. In addition, she is the Director of community and stakeholder engagement for the Hopkins Epidemiology Research Group in Organ Transplantation, core faculty at the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research, and affiliated faculty with the Bloomberg American Health Initiative and the Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research.
Dr. Purnell has received several national and international research honors and has published findings from her work in leading medical and public health journals, including JAMA, Health Affairs, Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, American Journal of Hypertension, American Journal of Transplantation, and Diabetes Care. She is deeply committed to community service, teaching, and mentoring and is the recipient of multiple Teaching Excellence Awards from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.