The E. RHODES AND LEONA B. CARPENTER FOUNDATION was formed in 1975 as the E. Rhodes Carpenter Foundation by E. Rhodes Carpenter, founder of the Richmond, Virginia-based company now known as Carpenter Co. Following Mr. Carpenter’s wishes, the Foundation received significant funding following his death in 1980. His wife, Leona B. Carpenter, died a year later, leaving substantial assets to the Foundation. In 1982, the name of the Foundation was changed to E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.
Mrs. Carpenter was born in Timberville, Virginia, on January 26th, 1916. She graduated in 1935 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Duke University. Upon graduation from the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing in 1939, she worked as a public health nurse in Virginia.
From 1942 to 1944, she was an instructor in the dispensary visiting nurse program at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. She served with the Army Nurse Corps from 1944 to 1945 and as Director of Nursing Services at King’s Daughters Hospital in Staunton, Virginia, from 1946 to 1947.
She married Paul Day in 1947 and took a position as education director of the Kanawah/Charleston City Health Department. After Day’s death, Carpenter remained active in nursing into the 1960s, teaching student nurses at Stuart Circle Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. She married E. Rhodes Carpenter of Carpenter Co. in 1971.
The E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation has provided generous funding to the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing for student scholarships, building campaigns, and the establishment of the Leona B. Carpenter Chair in Health Equity and Social Determinants of Health.
Held by Vincent Guilamo-Ramos
VINCENT GUILAMO-RAMOS is one of contemporary nursing’s most respected thought leaders, change agents and scientists. As a tenured professor and executive director of The Institute for Policy Solutions at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and the founder and director of the Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health (CLAFH), he works across disciplines to design, evaluate and promote nurse-led models of integrated clinical and social care that address our nation’s most pressing health challenges and opportunities for improvement.
Dr. Guilamo-Ramos’ research and advocacy have a primary focus on the elimination of health and health care inequities among marginalized communities, most notably among Latino youth and their families. His research has been federally funded for more than 20 consecutive years with grants from the NIH, CDC, HRSA and private philanthropic organizations. He and CLAFH colleagues developed the CLAFH Framework for Harmful Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) Mitigation, an innovative roadmap for educators, practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders designing programs to mitigate harmful SDOH. The CLAFH framework is being used to inform the development and evaluation of SDOH interventions in both community and clinical settings using explanatory randomized control trials. He and his team are conducting several community-based research studies at CLAFH including Project Confianza, a CDC-funded project examining the role of medical mistrust in HIV prevention and treatment uptake among Latino men who have sex with men in five cities across the contiguous U.S. and Puerto Rico. Dr. Guilamo-Ramos also co-directs the Nursing Science Incubator for SDOH Solutions (N-SISS), a NINR-funded capacity-building program that trains nurse scientists and scientists in aligned fields to apply the CLAFH Framework and rigorous SDOH-research methods to the development and dissemination of interventions that eliminate health and healthcare inequities.
Dr. Guilamo-Ramos has published more than 100 manuscripts in leading peer-reviewed scientific and health journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Medicine, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, JAMA Pediatrics, Pediatrics, and the American Journal of Public Health. Additionally, his work has been featured by major media outlets including, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Guardian.
Before joining the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, Dr. Guilamo-Ramos was Dean of the Duke University School of Nursing and Vice Chancellor for Nursing Affairs, where he realigned the school’s mission and strategic plan to advance health equity and social justice. Prior to his appointment at Duke, he held numerous tenured faculty and administrative appointments at both Columbia University and New York University (NYU). At NYU, he served as Associate Vice Provost of Mentoring and Outreach Programs, where he developed a university-wide mentoring infrastructure for the advancement of early career faculty with a focus on underrepresented faculty.
Dr. Guilamo-Ramos currently serves on several boards including UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization. He previously co-chaired the HHS Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Committee on Unequal Treatment Revisited: The Current State of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare. Dr. Guilamo-Ramos is a fellow of both the American Academy of Nursing and the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, an Aspen Health Innovators Fellow, and a Presidential Leadership Scholar.