Stephanie Desmon Joins Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as Director of Media and Public Relations

The Award-Winning Medical Journalist Was Most Recently Senior Media Representative at Johns Hopkins Medicine

Stephanie Desmon, an award-winning journalist who for the past four-and-half years served as senior media representative at Johns Hopkins Medicine, joined the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as director of media and public relations on June 16. In this role, she will lead the media and public relations team that communicates the School’s research, education and practice via the news media, social media and internal communications. Desmon will work with groups both inside and outside the School, to build upon its reputation as a worldwide leader in public health.

“We are very excited to have Stephanie Desmon join our team,” said Joshua Else, MBA, associate dean for external affairs. “She brings an effective combination of experience that includes journalism and medical-research media relations. She comes at an important juncture for the School, as it heads into its centennial in 2016 and as we move media and public relations in broader directions both here and overseas.”

Desmon will work within the communications and marketing team with the School’s Office of External Affairs.

At JHM, Desmon guided strategic communications for a range of specialties, including surgery, transplant, neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry, patient safety and critical care medicine. Her experience includes developing news releases, fielding media inquiries, placing stories in major newspapers and on network news programs, and managing media training.

Prior to joining JHM, Desmon was a reporter for nine years at The Baltimore Sun, where she wrote about medicine, politics and other topics. Her six-part series, “The Trial of Their Lives,” which depicted the stories of terminal cancer patients participating in an experimental breast cancer trial at Hopkins, won national recognition. Desmon also received a Gerald Loeb Award, the top journalism prize for business reporting, for a series about the decline of the Maryland crab industry and the rise of crabbing in Asia.

Desmon previously worked at newspapers in West Palm Beach and Jacksonville, Fla., and in Birmingham, Ala. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied American history.

She lives with her family in Towson, Md.

Media contact for Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Barbara Benham at 410-614-6029 or bbenham1@jhu.edu.