JC Cowden

Dr. Cowden is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a general academic pediatrician at Children's Mercy Kansas City, where he formerly served as Medical Director of the Office of Equity and Diversity and now serves as Health Equity Integration Project Leader. He is also Founder and Director of Children’s Mercy’s Culture and Language Coaching Program (CLCP), an innovative model for training bilingual health care providers seeking to reach a professional level of linguistic and cross-cultural proficiency.

Dr. Cowden is a founding member of the national-level Pediatric Health Equity Collaborative and serves on the Health Equity Strategy Group for Solutions for Patient Safety, a national pediatric safety network.

Dr. Cowden’s research and quality improvement interests include health equity integration throughout hospital systems, provider-patient communication, models for culturally and linguistically appropriate care, and data collection for health equity surveillance. In his bilingual primary care practice, he serves Spanish-speaking families from throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area.

Dr. Cowden trained in medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine, completed a pediatric residency at Seattle Children’s Hospital in Seattle, Washington, and received a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Washington. He also completed the Disparities Leadership Program at the Disparities Solutions Center, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.