Anh Tran, PhD, MPH, assistant professor, is vice chief of education for the Division of Community Health, and serves as program director for the Duke-Johnson & Johnson Nurse Leadership Program and the Master of Health Sciences in Clinical Leadership. She earned her Master of Public Health from UCLA and her doctorate in health behavior and health education from UNC-Chapel Hill.
- Years at Duke: 10
- Duke University School of Medicine educational program involvement: Duke-Johnson & Johnson Nurse Leadership Program, MHS in Clinical Leadership, Primary Care Transformation Fellowship, Primary Care Leadership Track, Community Health Elective
- Where you can see her next: Creating a Health Care Transformation Certificate program to focus on population health improvement, the principles of community engagement, and leadership and management development.
Tran is a veteran researcher and educator in the Department of Family Medicine & Community Health with an interest in providing training to learners at any stage in their health professions career in the areas of community engagement and population health improvement.
“The common thread across all programs [I’m involved with], whether they’re for medical students or seasoned clinicians who have been practicing for decades, is that it’s through the lens of community and population health improvement,” Tran says.
Opportunities for leadership and management training are also a main component of these educational programs, such as in the Duke-Johnson & Johnson Nurse Leadership Program. Now in its sixth year, the one-year fellowship — sponsored by Johnson & Johnson — gives advanced practiced nurses an opportunity to develop their leadership and management skills.
Last year, the program expanded by 50 percent to accept 45 fellows from across the United States. Tran enjoys watching the ripple effect of the training provided to these fellows and the projects they complete, and says the fellowship is an opportunity to fill a gap in health care access and services for vulnerable populations, as nurse practitioners and certified nurse midwives are given the opportunity to practice at the top of their scope and gain more autonomy.
“For our most recent 2018 graduating cohort of nurse leaders, 30 fellows’ health improvement projects benefited 521 health care providers and touched the lives of over 55,000 patients,” Tran says.
Tran’s research focus is in the area of community engaged research and addresses health inequities for vulnerable populations. She is currently a co-investigator on an NIH-funded R01 grant — ALMA, a randomized controlled trial to test the efficacy of a mindfulness-based behavioral health promotion program for Latinas and Latina immigrants.