Kamna Balhara, MD, MA

Dr. Kamna Balhara is an associate professor of emergency medicine (EM) and an associate director of the EM Residency Program at Johns Hopkins University.  After obtaining a master’s degree in French Cultural Studies from Columbia University, she completed medical school and residency at Johns Hopkins, serving as chief resident.

Dr. Balhara is an innovator in the health humanities and has experience with implementing humanities curricula for medical students, residents, and faculty from across specialties. She is a founder and co-director of the Health Humanities at Hopkins EM initiative, which offers social justice and humanities-based programming to institution, community, and national audiences. She also directs a unique longitudinal interdisciplinary institution-wide health equity and humanities track for residents and fellows across Johns Hopkins. She has been invited to speak to national audiences on the humanities in medicine and was selected as a Harvard Macy Institute Art Museum-Based Health Professions Education Fellow.

Her scholarly interests revolve around equity and inclusion in clinical and learning environments. She has authored multiple publications on graduate medical education, humanities, social determinants of health, and disparities in health care access, and has developed tools and resources for other educators seeking to apply the humanities towards equity in health care and health professions education. Her work has been funded by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the Josiah Macy Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Emergency Medicine Foundation. She serves on the steering committee for the National Health Humanities Consortium, is chair of the DEI committee of the Council of Residency Directors in Emergency Medicine, chair of the education subcommittee of SAEM's Equity and Inclusion committee, and is a member of the editorial board of the SAEM journal Academic Emergency Medicine.