Sarah Szanton

SARAH SZANTON, Ph.D., MSN, RN, FAAN, is the inaugural chair for the Patricia M. Davidson Scholarship in Health Equity and Social Justice and the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dean Szanton’s main research strands are aging in community, the effects of financial strain on health, and structural racial discrimination and resilience. She has published more than 140 papers and been the Principal Investigator on more than $20 million in grants.  She co-developed the CAPABLE program which has been tested in randomized trials and scaled nationally. She was a 2019 Heinz Award winner for the Human Condition and is a PBS Organization’s “Next Avenue Influencers in Aging.”

She has served as one of the core faculty at the Center on Aging and Health, and the the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions.. She has been by funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Innovation Center, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the John A. Hartford Foundation, the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation, the St. David’s Foundation, and the AARP Foundation.

Dr. Szanton completed her undergraduate work in African-American studies at Harvard University and holds a nurse practitioner master’s degree at the University of Maryland. Dr. Szanton is also a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, receiving her BSN in 1993 and her PhD in 2007.