Fox Chase Cancer Center Welcomes Charnita Zeigler-Johnson

Fox Chase Cancer Center is pleased to announce the hiring of Charnita Zeigler-Johnson, PhD, MPH, as Associate Director of Community Outreach and Engagement (COE).

“A dynamic leader with expertise in community-engaged research, Dr. Zeigler-Johnson will work collaboratively with our community partners as well as our cancer center leadership and clinical chairs to identify and address the needs of the communities we serve and to integrate community-engaged research across our scientific programs at Fox Chase and throughout Temple University Health System,” said Jonathan Chernoff, MD, PhD, Cancer Center Director.

Zeigler-Johnson will oversee the activities of the Fox Chase COE program as its academic lead. As an advocate for this work, she will:

• champion efforts to provide community cancer education and mobile screening services;
• prioritize education outreach focusing on cancers with the highest incidence and mortality in the Fox Chase catchment area, including breast, lung, prostate, colon, liver, and cervical cancers;

• support community-based lifestyle interventions targeting diet, nutrition, physical activity, tobacco control, and other behaviors that lower cancer risk and potentially improve cancer survival;
• conduct local community education, patient navigation, and delivery of research interventions;
• and serve as a liaison between scientists and community partners.

Zeigler-Johnson joins Fox Chase from Thomas Jefferson University, where she was an associate professor in the Division of Population Science, Department of Medical Oncology since 2013 and an associate professor in the College of Population Health since 2021. She also served as an adjunct scholar in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania since 2014.

A well-funded investigator with more than 50 peer-reviewed publications to her credit, Zeigler-Johnson’s research interests focus on the relationship between community history and prostate cancer disparities, as well as increasing lung cancer screening access and adherence in vulnerable populations. She has lectured locally, nationally, and internationally, and has served on the planning committees of various conferences focused on cancer disparities and cancer prevention.

Zeigler-Johnson earned both her doctoral degree in epidemiology and a master’s of public health with a focus on epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh. She completed her postdoctoral training in molecular epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania.

She is an executive team member of the African Caribbean Cancer Consortium, a collaborative research group of more than 150 members from 17 institutions in the United States and 23 countries in the Caribbean and Africa, for which she leads the Environment and Genetics in African Ancestry Working Group.

In addition, she is an active member of the American Association for Cancer Research and is a member of the American Society of Preventive Oncology. She also serves as a member of the Pennsylvania Cancer Coalition of the Pennsylvania Department of Health and recently completed a four-year term as co-chair of the Coalition’s Disparities Subcommittee.

Zeigler-Johnson is a peer reviewer for a number of professional journals, including Cancer; Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention; Cancer Causes and Control; the American Journal of Preventive Medicine; BMC Cancer; the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health; BMC Urology; and the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Zeigler-Johnson began her tenure at Fox Chase on October 10.