Jerry Johnson, M.D. will be the Core A Co-Director from Penn. Dr. Johnson is the Interim Director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine, Associate Director of the Institute on Aging, and Principal Investigator for the past nine years of a HRSA funded Center of Excellence for Diversity in Health Education and Research. His leadership has resulted in substantial progress in the School of Medicine in health disparities research and minority faculty development. As a long-term Penn faculty member and Center Director at Penn, Dr. Johnson will be particularly instrumental in facilitating the interaction the EXPORT Center with multiple collaborators across the University's schools, departments, institutes, and centers. As Interim Director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine, he will be instrumental in ensuring the impact and integration of the proposed EXPORT Center within the School of Medicine. Similarly, his role in the external representation of the Center will be enhanced by his visibility within the VA system, particularly his current role as Chair of the Steering. Committee of the state-wide Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion, and national leadership roles within the American Geriatrics Society and Gerontological Society of America.

As a health services researcher, Dr. Johnson will also have a key leadership role in facilitating this focus within the PCIEC. During the last five years, he has increasingly focused his efforts on defining and understanding the significance of cultural competence in the doctor-patient relationship (e.g., a study of the effect of cultural appropriateness on adherence to therapy and another of how African American elders define culturally competent care) and evaluating models of cultural competence education. He has become a leader in developing and evaluating models of cross-cultural education. The school of Medicine's unique longitudinal two-year curriculum of educating physicians in culturally appropriate care has been presented at the American Association of Medicine annual meetings in each of the past three years and in other forums. In 1998, Dr. Johnson was awarded a three-year grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation to develop a model of faculty and student education in Cultural Competence. As a board member and president-elect of the American Geriatrics Society, Dr. Johnson was instrumental in the formation of the Ethnogeriatrics Committee of the Society, which has since developed tools of cultural competence to be disseminated and evaluated in a variety of settings.

In 1993, Dr. Johnson was awarded a Center of Excellence for Diversity in Health Education and Research (formerly called Center of Excellence for Minority Health). This Center, one of 24 in the United States, soon became a model for minority faculty recruitment and development. The Center is grounded in the philosophy that institutions must grow their own faculty and that faculty development must start as early in the pipeline as possible. The Center has been marked by substantial accomplishments since its initial funding in 1993. These include: the School of Medicine's implementation of two intensive longitudinal secondary school training programs (one predominantly African American and the other predominantly Hispanic); maintenance of an underrepresented minority student enrollment above the national average; an increase in the underrepresented minority faculty enrollment from 27 to 65 full time minority faculty in the tenure and clinician educator tracks (13.8% since 1993 and 73% since 1999); implementation of curricular changes related to minority health and cultural competence involving the entire medical student class. Thus, Dr. Johnson is largely responsible for the beginning that Penn has made towards addressing disparities issues on a campus-wide level. Finally, Dr. Johnson, as a long term and highly respected member of the Philadelphia medical community and one who has engaged in considerable community outreach activities, will have an important role in the links between the EXPORT Center and local community. These links will be made through Penn's existing collaboration with a consortium of six Philadelphia secondary schools and the Academic Support Programs of the University of Pennsylvania (Upward Bound and undergraduate programs), as well as collaborations to be developed.

(c) 2003 center for clinical epidemiology and biostatistics · export-study@cceb.med.upenn.edu