Office of Well-Being

Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs, Department of Medicine
Associate Professor of Medicine, Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine
Associate Faculty Member, Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality
Investigator, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

Lee Daugherty Biddison is associate professor of medicine in the Johns Hopkins Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and chief wellness officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is associate faculty in the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality and a contributing scholar in the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Dr. Daugherty Biddison’s research interests include hospital operations, patient safety, critical care disaster response and physician well-being.

In addition to her research responsibilities, Dr. Daugherty Biddison serves as vice chair for clinical affairs for the Department of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She chairs the department’s Clinical Directors Council and co-chairs the Clinical Affairs Planning and Strategy team. She also serves as a member of The Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Credentials Committee. Immediately prior to becoming chief wellness officer, she served on the Dean’s Task Force on Joy in Medicine. As part of that work, she co-chaired the Working Group on Culture and Work-Life Balance and served as lead author of the summary report of the task force. She currently represents Johns Hopkins on the National Academy of Medicine Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience.

Dr. Daugherty Biddison completed her undergraduate studies in journalism at Washington and Lee University, magna cum laude, and received her medical degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine, cum laude. She is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha honor societies. She completed her internal medicine residency at the University of Pennsylvania and her pulmonary and critical care medicine fellowship at Johns Hopkins, where she also earned her master’s degree in public health.

Since April 2020, Carolyn has worked with the Office of Well-Being’s Mental, Emotional and Spiritual Health (MESH) collaborative. She teamed up with George Everly, Deborah Dang and Albert Wu to develop crisis leadership training that she has facilitated for over 1,200 leaders across JHM. Carolyn has also facilitated listening and well-being sessions for front-line leaders and teams.

Over the course of her career, Carolyn has held several roles and faculty positions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, while providing consultation and research expertise to the Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH) Department of Nursing. In 2017, she joined the hospital full time as director of the Center for the Practice of Collaborative Leadership. In this position, Carolyn has been responsible for the strategic design of programs that support nursing teams from the front line to the boardroom regarding trust-building, curiosity and personal mastery.

Carolyn has played an instrumental role in many essential and transformational initiatives for the JHH Department of Nursing. She led the evaluation of the PROPEL intervention and qualitative research that revealed trust as the foundational issue for nurse satisfaction at JHH, which led to the Department of Nursing’s investment in trust-building. Carolyn also implemented Question Thinking training and the Inquiring Leadership program; the front-line-nurse-informed redesign of the nursing professional practice model; and the shift from a focus on weaknesses to identifying and strategically leveraging strengths.

Carolyn came to Baltimore by way of South Africa. There she completed training in nursing, midwifery and community health, and earned a doctorate from the University of Cape Town. Her doctoral work and community interventions to help prevent pediatric pedestrian injury earned her the University of Cape Town Medical School’s Doctoral Research Prize and South Africa’s highest traffic safety award. In 1991, Carolyn moved to Baltimore for a postdoctoral fellowship in health policy and injury prevention, as well as to obtain a master’s degree in public health at Johns Hopkins.

Carolyn is a certified trust practitioner, and is master accredited as a facilitator for the health system by the Reina Trust Building Institute. She holds certifications in positive psychology and brain-based coaching, and is credentialed by the International Coach Federation.

Assistant Professor, General Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Assistant Professor, Health, Behavior and Society, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health

Richard Safeer is the chief medical director of employee health and well-being for Johns Hopkins Medicine. In this role, he leads the Healthy at Hopkins employee health and well-being strategy. He currently sees patients in the Johns Hopkins Hospital Division of Pediatric Cardiology. In addition, he teaches in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Safeer completed his bachelor’s degree in nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University before graduating from medical school at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He completed his residency in family medicine at Franklin Square Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, and completed a faculty development fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is certified in clinical lipidology by the National Lipid Association.

Prior to arriving at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Safeer practiced family medicine in Northern Virginia. He was on faculty at The George Washington University, where he served as residency director of the family medicine training program. He was the medical director of an occupational health center in Baltimore and wellness director for the Mid-Atlantic region of the center’s parent company, just before starting at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield in Baltimore, Maryland, as the medical director of preventive medicine. He currently serves on the board of directors for the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. He has achieved fellowship status in the American Academy of Family Medicine, the American College of Preventive Medicine and the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.