Dr. Johnnye Lewis directs several
environmental and public health programs at the University of New Mexico. In the
College of Pharmacy, she is Director of the Community Environmental Health
Program, the group that develops and maintains Healthy Voices projects and the
website. She brings her background in laboratory science in pharmacology and
toxicology together with a commitment to working with communities to ensure that
science is translated into action to prevent disease, improve clinical care and
develop informed policy.
She also runs the Clinical and Translational Science
Center's Novel Methodologies component, which is focused on developing new
approaches to get science out of the lab and into public use to protect people's
health. Dr. Lewis's work as Director of Community Outreach and Education for the
New Mexico Center for Environmental Health Science has led her to strive to
improve communication among scientists, policy-makers, communities, and health
care providers.
She conducts research with community partners such as the
Navajo and the Cheyenne River Sioux. In these programs, she works with
communities to help develop research protocols to collect, analyze, and
interpret data to address concerns about environmental exposures and to ensure
that results are conveyed not only to other researchers, but also to
decision-makers in government, health care centers and communities to inform
actions and policies that improve public health.