Keynote talk title
Arctic Health and Well-Being: Working Better Together
Short biography
Rhonda M. Johnson, DrPH, MPH, FNP is Professor of Public Health at University of Alaska Anchorage, and recent past Chair of the Department of Health Sciences (2005-2015) and MPH Program Coordinator (2004-2014).
She is actively involved in the UAA distance-delivered graduate program in public health that is focused on northern and circumpolar health issues, and was recently voted President-Elect of the Alaska Public Health Association (ALPHA). She also worked as a primary care provider for almost two decades, including serving several years as Clinic Director and clinician in the Alaska Tribal Health System, and as a past member of the Alaska Area Institutional Review Board (AAIRB). She is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer/Trainer (Thailand, 1980-83), co-founder of the nationally recognized Anchorage Health Literacy Collaborative that trains adult learners of English to be Peer Leader Navigators (PLNs), and past Project Director for the NIH-funded UAA Center for Addressing Health Disparities through Research and Education (CAHDRE).
Dr Johnson is currently part of the administrative core and advisory team for the new NIMH-funded Alaska Native Collaborative Hub for Resilience Research (ANCHRR), past-President of the American Society of Circumpolar Health (2012-2015), and current Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Circumpolar Health. She teaches courses in circumpolar health, public health and society, program evaluation, health administration and policy, and public health ethics, and in the past decade or so, has been active as faculty in several collaborative circumpolar health summer institutes.