About
Allison Barlow, PhD, MPH joined the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health in 1991. In April 2016, she was named Director of the Center. She now directs the Center alongside two Indigenous co-directors, Dr. Melissa Walls and Dr. Donald Warne. The Center now has 350+ faculty and staff (80% are Indigenous) working with tribal communities in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
For over 30 years, she has worked in partnership with Indigenous communities to develop, evaluate, and scale public health interventions that promote equity across behavioral and mental health, early childhood development, and adolescent health and development. Her most significant line of work has been to work in partnership with Indigenous communities to design, evaluate, and scale the Family Spirit early childhood home-visiting program that has served over 180 tribal communities in the US and received a $28M global prize from LEGO Foundation to share the program with Indigenous communities internationally. In addition, for the past 30 years, she has been part of a team leading the development, evaluation and scaling of the Celebrating Life suicide prevention initiative, with unique evidence of significantly reducing suicide ideation, attempts and death among Indigenous youth and young adults. Other major service projects she has led include the creation of Native Vision, a sports-centered youth development program that engages professional and collegiate athletes and coaches as mentors in camps and afterschool programming.
Her work is grounded in community-based participatory research methods and centers Indigenous leadership at every stage, from program design to implementation and dissemination. She is committed to advancing tribal sovereignty, culturally centered practice, and current and future generations of Indigenous public health leaders.
