Certified Listener Poet,
Cohort 5 Winter 2023
Khaliah Johnson received her medical degree at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA in 2007. She then went on to train in General Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD. Her desire to serve children and families facing complex, life-threatening illness led her to pursue fellowship training in Pediatric Palliative Care at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Upon completing fellowship in 2012, Dr. Johnson joined the Pediatric Advanced Care Team at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta to help expand pediatric palliative care services available to children in Georgia. She now serves as Division Chief for Pediatric Palliative care at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University’s Department of Pediatrics and spends part of her clinical time at Grady Medical Center, providing palliative care at one of the largest pediatric HIV clinics in the United States.
Dr. Johnson’s particular career interests are in community-based pediatric care, health equity, healthcare advocacy, and developing strategies to improve access to high-quality palliative care services to marginalized populations. Dr. Johnson was prestigiously named a Cambia Health Foundation Sojourns Scholar in 2021, where her work focuses on addressing racism in pediatric serious illness. She has experience in community-based participatory research and has lobbied on Capitol Hill at the state and federal levels for health care legislation impacting children and families facing serious illness.
Dr. Johnson also has a passion for writing as tool for advocacy and healing. She has published narrative essays and opinion pieces on her experiences as a physician, mother, and African American woman, and she was trained as a Listener Poet in 2023 by The Good Listening Project. Her commitment to serving the underserved extends beyond her roles at Emory and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, as she consistently remains engaged in outreach to youth and the homeless through volunteer efforts and church ministries and is the founder of the non-profit initiative in rural Kenya, We are Wendo.
You can learn more about Dr. Johnson’s work here: khaliahjohnsonmd.com.