Katherine Ornstein

Katherine Ornstein is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing with joint appointments in the Bloomberg School of Public Health's Department of Health Policy and Management, and the School of Medicine's Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology. She directs the Center for Equity in Aging and is affiliated with multiple JHU aging-related centers. Her work focuses on improving healthcare equity for older adults with serious illness, home-based care delivery, dementia care, and end-of-life care. She holds a PhD in epidemiology from Columbia University.

Her research, funded by NIH and CDC, explores caregiving burdens, homebound populations, and the economic impacts of healthcare on families. Notable recent work includes studies on dementia care outcomes, social isolation's health effects, and pandemic impacts on homebound older adults.

• Education: PhD in Epidemiology (Columbia University), MPH, BA

Dr. Ornstein's awards include the 2024 Excellence in Research Mentoring and 2023 Isabel Hampton Robb Distinguished Scholar. She has advised numerous NIH-funded studies and collaborates across disciplines to address healthcare disparities in aging populations.

Current projects examine rural-urban disparities in palliative care access, caregiver mental health, and leveraging big data to improve home-based care models. She leads efforts to define criteria for effective home-based primary care and reduce inequities in dementia care delivery.