Alumna proclaimed a 'genius'

What will Lisa Cooper 84C do with her $500,000 "Genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation? "I can think outside the box…take a chance on something that is maybe outside of the mainstream," she told The Emory Wheel. A world-renowned physician, Cooper's box is already pretty substantial.

Photo courtesy of Johns Hopkins University

Emory alumna Lisa Cooper 84C has been named one of 24 new MacArthur Fellows for 2007 and will receive a $500,000, “no strings attached,” MacArthur ‘genius’ grant.   

Cooper is a world-renowned physician, who currently serves as a professor of medicine, epidemiology, health policy, and management at Johns Hopkins.  Cooper also conducts research concerning public health, focusing much of her attention on the role race, ethnicity, and gender play in doctor-patient interactions. And it was this innovative research that led the MacArthur Foundation, on of the nation’s largest nonprofits, to name Cooper one of its 2007 fellows.

Cooper came to the United States in 1980 to study at Emory and to escape the political tumult of her native Liberia. After graduating in 1984 with a degree in chemistry, she went on to receive a medical degree from the University of North Carolina and a master’s degree in public health at Johns Hopkins.           

Cooper began her research in the 1990s using observations from her residency at the University of Maryland hospital in Baltimore as her starting point. In 1999 she published her initial findings in a Journal of the American Medical Association paper. By the time she published her paper, Cooper had studied more than 1,800 patients in the Washington area. What she had found was that minority patients perceived their physicians’ decision-making style as significantly less participatory than non-minorities and that when physicians involved patients in treatment decisions, the treatment was more effective.
           
After conducting further research and taping doctor-patient interactions, Cooper told the Baltimore Sun, “We found a couple of things. One was that doctors talked more than they listened. But they talked 50 percent more than their white patients and 73 percent more than their minority patients. We also found that the minority patients sounded less assertive, less interested, than white patients. So it was definitely something reciprocal.”
           
Since taping those initial interactions, Cooper and her team have continued working on more studies to try to better understand communication’s role in patient well-being. She has also developed educational programs designed to improve the diagnosis and treatment of hypertension and depression among African-Americans. Results from the programs seem to suggest that, when both patients and physicians are trained in patient-centered communication skills, the patients are more like to continue seeing their doctors and to follow treatment plans.
           
However, now that she has been give the $500,000 MacArthur grant, she’s not entirely sure what she’d like to do. “It [the grant] means I can think outside the box…take a chance on something that is maybe outside of the mainstream,” Cooper told The Emory Wheel. “I can go anywhere, study any population I want to, any particular problem I want to, using any specific method.”
           
No matter what she decides to do with the grant, though, as Cooper told the Wheel, she’s just glad the MacArthur Foundation was “willing to take a chance on [her].”—Jessica Sanford 10C