Amanda Latimore
Amanda Latimore is a social epidemiologist and the Director of AIR's Center for Addiction Research and Effective Solutions (AIR CARES). AIR CARES’s multidisciplinary team conducts research, delivers education and technical assistance, engages communities, and translates research into action with the goal of preventing addiction and addressing the needs of those impacted by addiction. Dr. Latimore emphasizes in her approach to this work the role of social, economic, and political context in facilitating or impeding health.
Dr. Latimore draws on her experience as faculty, researcher, and public health practitioner at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she was Public Sector Initiatives Lead for the Bloomberg American Health Initiative. There she worked directly with state public officials to provide technical assistance on the overdose crisis, strategies that spanned prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and recovery. Within the university walls, she cultivated opportunities for research translation through academic-public sector partnerships.
Prior to joining AIR, Dr. Latimore also held leadership roles with Baltimore City’s health department and Baltimore City’s behavioral health authority. There she led data projects to inform decision-making and advocacy. Her expertise on municipal-level evaluations, performance-based initiatives, data linkages and dashboards, stakeholder engagement, capacity assessments, rapid response to syndromic surveillance of overdose provides a practical backdrop for supporting public agencies, empowering communities, and leveraging data to make an impact on health at the local level.
As part of a community-based participatory research project, Dr. Latimore collaborated with a local youth empowerment center to understand how addressing trauma and streamlining mental health services into employment training programs impact economic and educational outcomes of disconnected youth. Dr. Latimore also amplified the voice of people who use drugs through projects which detailed their experiences, perceptions, and needs during emergency medical staff and police encounters during overdose events.
While conducting community-based, city, state, and national research, Dr. Latimore utilized a variety methodological approaches while staying grounded by the needs of service providers and the needs of those they serve. This includes conducting multilevel modeling to investigate the factors that predict family engagement and service tailoring across home visiting models. Other expertise include: propensity score analyses, geospatial analyses, and qualitative and mixed methods.
Dr. Latimore is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she continues to teach social epidemiology.