Dr. Yvonne Owens Ferguson is the Chief Research, Learning, and Evaluation Officer at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. She brings more than 15 years of experience in leading community-engaged research, large-scale program evaluations, and data-informed strategic planning.
A native of Kansas City, Dr. Ferguson previously served at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where she was Program Leader for the NIH Common Fund’s Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS) Program. Launched in 2023, ComPASS is a groundbreaking 10-year, $400 million initiative—the first of its kind at NIH—to directly fund community organizations as research leaders in advancing health equity. Her leadership in health disparities and equity research earned her NIH Director’s Awards in both 2022 and 2023.
Trained as a behavioral public health scientist, Dr. Ferguson has worked globally and nationally to improve public health through research, policy, and practice. She has collaborated with international organizations in Lilongwe, Malawi, as well as private companies, nonprofit organizations, universities, and multiple U.S. federal agencies. At NIH, she also served as a Scientific Review Officer with the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Center for Scientific Review, and earlier as a Public Health Analyst with the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), contributing to the implementation of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
Dr. Ferguson earned her Ph.D. in Health Behavior, with a Certificate in International Development, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, where she also completed her MPH. She holds a B.S. in Biology from Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.
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