Martha Hill, PhD, RN HPA Advisory Board

Martha Hill, a Johns Hopkins faculty member since 1980, became dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing in July 2002 after a year as interim dean.

Hill was one of the first four faculty members to join Dean Carol Gray when the School of Nursing was established as an independent division of the university in 1985. Previously, nursing education at Hopkins had occurred within another university school or in a hospital-based school.

Hill is internationally known for developing and testing strategies to improve hypertension care and control among urban, underserved African-Americans, particularly young men. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. She was co-vice chair of an institute committee that developed a report titled "Unequal Treatment: Confronting Ethnic and Racial Disparities in Health Care." In 1997-98, she was the first non-physician to serve as president of the American Heart Association.

At Johns Hopkins, she became director of the Center for Nursing Research in 1994. She has served as a member and chair of the university-wide Committee for the 21st Century and as co-chair of the Urban Health Council , a joint Hopkins-community committee whose work led to the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute. She holds joint faculty appointments in both the School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Hill earned a diploma from the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing in 1964 and graduated with a bachelor s degree in 1966 from what is now the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education. She earned a master s in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977 and a doctorate in behavioral sciences in 1986 from what is now the Bloomberg School of Public Health.