Professor of Medicine
Washington University in St. Louis
Donna B. Jeffe, Ph.D., is Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Medical Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine. She also is Director of the Health Behavior, Communication, and Outreach Core, an affiliated resource of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Sciences and the Siteman Cancer Center, and the Director of the School of Medicine’s Medical Education Research Unit (MERU). For more than 25 years, she has been principal investigator (PI) or co-investigator of numerous educational, behavioral, and clinical studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal and private funding agencies. Dr. Jeffe studies personal and environmental factors in relation to health-risk and health-promoting behaviors and emotional adjustment to disease, focusing on quality of life in cancer patients and cancer prevention and control in underserved groups. She has extensive experience in survey development and validation, psychometrics, qualitative research design and data analysis, and epidemiological research. In addition, she has an active, educational program of research as PI of a national-cohort study of all U.S. medical school matriculants in academic years 1993-1994 through 2000-2001. Since 2008, she has received continual funding from the NIH/National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R01 GM085350) for this study to identify interventions that serve to increase the recruitment, retention and promotion of women and underrepresented minorities in academic-medicine and biomedical-research careers as physician-scientists—a research program that grew directly from her abiding interest in reducing health disparities.