Tyra Bryant-Stephens, MD

Tyra Bryant-Stephens, is a board-certified pediatrician in clinical primary care practice for over 30 years and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In 1997 she founded the Community Asthma Prevention Program (CAPP) of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), an asthma program that utilizes community health workers to implement asthma interventions in underserved, poorly-resourced inner-city communities. As Medical Director of the program, she leads a core staff that includes public health professionals, nurse coordinator, research coordinators and community health workers.

Dr. Bryant-Stephens is nationally recognized for her work in community-driven, evidence-based research in asthma interventions.  Over the past 23 years she has led a number of projects to improve asthma management through community-based interventions. These projects received funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Pennsylvania Department of Health, Merck Childhood Asthma Network and other foundations.

CAPP has made over 21,000 home-based asthma visits, educated thousands of caregivers in community education classes, provided site-based asthma trainings for hundreds of primary care providers and taught hundreds of children in school-based asthma classes. Recently Dr. Bryant-Stephens has partnered with home repair agencies to create the CAPP+ program where structural home repairs are carried out to eliminate root causes of asthma triggers including roof repairs, wall repairs, plumbing repairs and pest extrusion procedures. She leads a partnership of interdisciplinary stakeholders including public health professionals, community agencies, parents, clinicians, educators and researchers, the CAPP Collaborative, who are invested in improving lives for children with asthma and convenes an annual conference, The Fighting Asthma Disparities Summit, attended by local, state and national stakeholders. In 2015, her work was recognized by the White House and she was invited to participate in a roundtable discussion with President Obama, the Surgeon General and EPA Administrator to discuss strategies to engage the community in the health impacts of climate change.

Dr. Bryant-Stephens was a founding member of the Philadelphia Coalition of Black Pediatricians and Pennsylvania Asthma Partnership. She is a past member of the US EPA Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee. Most recently she served as a member of the Expert Panel Working Group of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute which released the  2020 Focused Updates to the Asthma Management Guidelines. She coordinates asthma care education annually for more than 70 primary care physicians in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Care Network, which serves approximately 50,000 inner-city patients and conducts over 100,000 patient visits each year. She serves on regional and national advisory committees and locally serves as a member of the Philadelphia Board of Health, the Racial Equity Committee for COVID-19 testing and the COVID-19 Vaccine Advisory Committee.

Dr. Bryant-Stephens has been married to her college sweetheart, Dr. Paul Stephens Jr, for almost forty years and is the proud mother of two amazing daughters and grandmother of three adorable children.