Profile

Melinda Morton Hamer, MD, MPH

Johns Hopkins University

Contact Details

Johns Hopkins University

Bio

Melinda Morton Hamer MD, MPH is Chief of the Clinical Trials Center at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where she provides oversight of clinical trials for new vaccines and drugs targeting a number of infectious diseases, including Zika virus, Ebolavirus, malaria, HIV, MERS, and others. She is also an active duty U.S. Army emergency physician, flight surgeon and a part-time Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Military and Emergency Medicine at the Uniformed Services University, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the George Washington University. She has significant career experience in the military and medical fields, as well as in academic research focusing on health policy, disaster medicine, and humanitarian response.

A West Point graduate, Dr. Hamer served in Hawaii, Egypt, and Washington DC in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks as a military police officer prior to attending medical school. While active duty, Dr. Hamer led security details and coordinated interagency disaster response planning for VIPs and special events at military bases in the Washington DC area.

Dr. Hamer was a Sommer Scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where she earned her MPH, and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She has held multiple national board positions in the specialty of emergency medicine, and was selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. Dr. Hamer is also the author of official U.S. Government and Institute of Medicine reports on health care reconstruction efforts in Iraq, and over 30 publications. She has conducted emergency medicine and disaster research in Iraq, Sudan, Uganda, Ghana, and Senegal, and was faculty for the 2011 World Health Organization Public Pre-Deployment Course in Hammamet, Tunisia.