Karen Armitage is Director of Health Policy and Director and Advisor of the MD/MPH Dual Degree and Preventive Medicine Residency MPH Program at University of New Mexico (UNM) College of Population Health (COPH), with a secondary appointment as Associate Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at UNM School of Medicine. She is a pediatrician and public health physician with two decades of service in the public health sector, finishing up as Chief Medical Officer for the New Mexico Department of Health in 2007-2010. As health policy director for the newest college at UNM, Armitage envisions two core roles for COPH: to train the future population health workforce and to advance population health science. The question that launched the concept of population health over 20 years ago, "Why are some people healthy, and others not?", continues to inspire her research, teaching and service. 

 Armitage received her MD from University of California San Diego in 1978, and completed a residency in pediatrics in 1981 and a post-graduate RWJF research fellowship in Child Health Promotion in 1983, which included completion of MPH courses at University of Minnesota. In 2000, she developed a required one-month rotation for family medicine residents in legislative advocacy and public health at the New Mexico State Legislature, and continues to serve as an attending physician for the rotation. From 2012-2016, Armitage directed a UNM Health Sciences Center (HSC) statewide health improvement initiative that aligned partners in the health sciences center with key stakeholders in communities to address key population health outcomes and determinants using concrete measures. In 2014, she was selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow and worked in the US Senate in Washington, DC for a year. In 2016, she received the UNM Leonard M. Napolitano award.

 In addition to serving as Director of Health Policy and faculty member at COPH, Armitage teaches at all levels, from undergraduate to medical residency and delivers a community-based, team-taught interdisciplinary curriculum in health policy to third year medical students. Her research interests include health policy, evidence-based population health interventions, innovative curricula in health sciences and integrating routine measurement of cardiorespiratory fitness into primary care settings.