Kamaria Kaalund is currently a doctoral student in Health Services Research and Policy in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Kamaria’s research interests include assessing the impact of structural determinants of health, strengthening community-based care delivery models, and advancing health equity in alternative payment models and quality of care. Kamaria applies a health equity lens to policy solutions that address systemic barriers to achieving full health and well-being. Kamaria’s research praxis rests on ethnographic inquiry, feminist theory, feminist science and technology studies, and environmental justice.

Before beginning her doctoral studies, Kamaria was a Policy Analyst at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy in Durham, North Carolina. At Duke-Margolis, she co-led timely research on equity gaps in the COVID-19 pandemic response, the impact of treated and untreated hearing loss on health-related quality of life utilities, scaling up the provision of global hearing health care, policy options to sustain health insurance enrollment expansion across Latino communities in North Carolina, and the use of disadvantage indices in policy decision-making. Kamaria received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 2020, where she studied neuroscience and anthropology.