Dr. April Joy Damian is a healthcare executive, psychiatric epidemiologist, and mixed-methods public health and health services researcher whose work focuses on building the infrastructure, partnerships, and evidence needed to move healthcare innovation from concept to scale. Her career has centered on advancing solutions that improve access, quality, and outcomes for communities that have historically been overlooked by traditional systems of care. 

She serves as Chief Scientific Officer and Director of the Weitzman Institute, where she leads efforts that align clinical practice, research, workforce development, and implementation strategy to redesign how care is delivered in communities with significant unmet needs. Her work has supported the development, testing, and scaling of evidence-based primary care and mental health interventions across more than 1,200 multi-site community health centers serving over 2 million safety-net patients annually throughout all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam. 

Dr. Damian also serves as faculty in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Chair of the Healthy Parenting in Primary Care Collaborative, and an appointed member of the AcademyHealth Methods and Data Council. She previously served as inaugural Vice Chair of the NIH RECOVER Committee on Patient-Reported Outcomes and Community Engagement and as Senior Scholar in Residence at AcademyHealth. Through these leadership roles, she has helped shape national conversations on healthcare transformation, patient-centered outcomes research, and community-engaged approaches to improving population health. 

Drawing on experience spanning the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the International Organization for Migration, the Kapor Center, and local public health departments in Baltimore and San Francisco, Dr. Damian has built cross-sector collaborations across government agencies, academia, payers, philanthropy, and community organizations. She has led initiatives funded by federal agencies, national foundations, and private funders that translate research into real-world applications and measurable impact.