James Guevara, MD, MPH is a Professor of Pediatrics & Epidemiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and an attending physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). He was a founding member of PolicyLab, a center at CHOP that seeks to provide research evidence to inform policy decisions. Dr. Guevara’s interests lie at the intersection of early child development, behavior, and health inequities. He has been the recipient of numerous awards from the National Institutes of Health, the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Maternal Child Health Bureau, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and other private funders. His research involves partnerships with community-based organizations, government agencies, and parent advocacy groups to address important policy-relevant questions aimed at reducing inequities in early childhood.
Currently, he is conducting RCTs of family navigation for early intervention referrals among young children with developmental disabilities, a social media-based parenting program for women suffering from postpartum depression, and a behavioral economics intervention to promote parent-child shared reading. He co-directs a graduate level course on health disparities research at Penn and mentors physician fellows and doctoral students at CHOP and Penn. He is a standing member of the Healthcare and Health Disparities (HHD) study section at NIH, a member of the executive committee of the Council on Early Childhood at the American Academy of Pediatrics, and an associate editor at the peer-reviewed journal Academic Pediatrics.