Anh N. Tran, PhD, MPH, Associate Professor in Family Medicine and Community Health, is Vice Chief of Education for the Division of Community Health. Dr. Tran leads efforts to innovate population health improvement curricula and research at Duke and beyond. All her diverse endeavors focus on promoting population health improvement through a unifying thread: engaging with community/stakeholders in an authentic and collaborative manner, addressing social (non-medical) determinants of health, and providing transformational leadership to serve vulnerable populations. Dr Tran currently serves as Director of the Duke Master of Health Sciences in Clinical Leadership Program and Third Year Research Study Program for the School of Medicine’s Primary Care Leadership Track, which trains students to become community-engaged primary care leaders. She is Co-Investigator for a Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) - funded Duke Primary Care Transformation Fellowship and also course director for a community health elective for medical, physician assistant and Master of Biomedical Sciences Program students. From 2013-2021, she led the Duke-Johnson & Johnson Nurse Leadership Program, which was a leadership development program that provided advanced practice nurses and their health care teams with skills and guidance to create and implement transformational health initiatives for their patients, organizations and communities. She will be launching in 2022 the Duke Advanced Practice Provider Leadership Institute (APPLI).
Dr. Tran also served as Co-Investigator on an Association for Prevention Teaching and Research (APTR) multi-institution grant, where she developed web-based education modules, made available in 2012, for health professional trainees on the key concepts of community engaged research and translating research to practice. In addition, she served as faculty for the “Interprofessional Introduction to Prevention” course designed for 1st year Medical, PA PT and Nursing students – one of the only courses of its kind in the country that brings together clinician learners from different disciplines early in their training to be educated together in preventive health and medicine. Dr. Tran also has over 20 years of experience in implementing and evaluating community-engaged research studies and public health intervention programs aimed at improving the health status of communities which face the greatest health inequities. She has conducted social and behavioral science research in both domestic and international settings, and topics have included lay health advisor programs, culturally competent health care, cross cultural medicine, patient-provider interaction, mental health services, and chronic and infectious disease prevention. Current research endeavors focus on Latina mental health promotion, health disparities of inflammatory breast cancer, epigenetic changes in men who use cannabis and patient centered models of care in resource poor Asian countries. Dr Tran earned her Bachelor of Science in Psychology with a Philosophy minor from Oklahoma State University. She later received her MPH in Community Health Sciences from University of California-Los Angeles and spent time in Vietnam as a NIH Fogarty International Center research fellow. While completing her PhD in Health Behavior and Health Education at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC), Dr. Tran received fellowship training support from the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Control and Education Program, administered through UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.