Included: Advancing Health Equity for People with Disabilities

Bonnielin K. Swenor, PhD, MPH 
Associate Professor | Johns Hopkins School of Nursing

Director | Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center

Bonnielin Swenor is an epidemiologist and associate professor at The Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and holds joint appointments at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center, which aims to shift the paradigm from ‘living with a disability’ to ‘thriving with a disability’ through research, education, and policy.

 Dr. Swenor’s research is motivated by her experience with disability, as she has low vision. Her work takes a ‘disability data justice’ approach to advancing equity for people with disabilities and focuses on three areas: (1) developing novel methods to quantify health disparities impacting disabled people; (2) testing innovative strategies to reduce these inequities and their upstream root causes, and (3) promoting disability inclusion in higher education, STEM, public health, and health care professions. She is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Forum on Aging, Disability, and Independence and serves as an advisor on disability equity and inclusion to multiple organizations and agencies, including the Subgroup on Individuals with Disabilities within the Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Health Equity Workgroup within the ACD at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).