Jody Hooper, MD

The Division of Minimally Invasive Surgery located at Johns Hopkins Hospital specializes in the surgical treatment of gastrointestinal and abdominal wall disease. The division has particular expertise in the foregut, stomach and upper small intestines. Additionally, we offer surgery for benign gallbladder disease and a wide range of hernias. Throughout the department, our surgeons utilize the world’s most advanced minimally invasive and robotic surgery techniques to perform safe and precise procedures with small incisions, leading to quicker recovery times, less scarring, shorter hospital stays and reduced blood loss for patients.

Dr. Douglas Ball is an associate professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He holds a joint appointment in oncology. His areas of clinical expertise include diagnostic radiology, endocrine oncology, thyroid cancer and thyroid diseases. Dr. Ball earned his M.D. from the George Washington University School of Medicine. He completed his residency at the University of Pittsburgh-Presbyterian University Hospital and performed a fellowship in endocrinology and metabolism at Johns Hopkins. His research interests include medullary thyroid cancer, differentiated thyroid cancer and anaplastic thyroid cancer.

Dr. Daniel Ford is a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He holds joint appointments in psychiatry and behavioral sciences and, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in health policy and management and in epidemiology. Dr. Ford serves as the director of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research and the senior associate dean for clinical and translational research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Widely regarded as a pioneer in research associated with the interrelationships between mental disorders and chronic medical conditions, Dr. Ford gained international acclaim for clinical studies documenting depression as an independent risk factor for coronary heart disease and for research describing the long-term health risks related to sleep disturbances. He was chosen by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to direct the evaluation of its $12 million Depression in Primary Care Initiative. He also has been the principal researcher on a large training grant to develop researchers in general internal medicine.A leader in using the Internet for clinical research, Dr. Ford worked closely with Johns Hopkins personnel who developed e-IRB, an electronic process for submitting research proposals to the school of medicine’s Institutional Review Board, which oversees requests to launch clinical studies. His research interests include ways to improve the treatment of chronic diseases through information technology. He also advocates treating human research subjects as partners, ensuring that they receive sufficient thanks for their commitment and willingness to contribute to scientific progress.Dr. Ford received his M.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1982. He arrived at Hopkins that year as a medical resident and, except for a brief period as a National Institutes of Health fellow, has been on the Johns Hopkins faculty ever since. He received his master’s degree in public health from the Bloomberg School in 1986. He has published more than 120 research papers and book chapters, and was associate editor of the Journal of General Internal Medicine and a member of the editorial board of General Hospital Psychiatry.