Ellesse Akré, PhD, MA
Assistant Professor
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Health services researcher Ellesse-Roselee Akré, PhD, MA, is an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Health Policy and Management department.
Akré’s research portfolio focuses on health inequities, intersectionality, and access to healthcare. She utilizes tools from health services research and population health science to demonstrate how macrolevel systems such as heterosexism, sexism, and racism are determinants of health inequities.
She leverages the frameworks of critical race theory and intersectionality perspective to quantitatively study how social, demographic, and policy contexts shape health and healthcare disparities—particularly in Black people and people of color, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations.
More recently, Akré has incorporated older sexual and gender minorities into her research and has also expanded her work to include studies on how social determinants of health during the pandemic have impacted adults and older adults within the LGBT community.
She has an extensive record of teaching undergraduate and graduate level courses, including introductory courses on the foundations of public health and research methods, as well as advanced courses on health systems, leadership and healthcare communication, and coalition building for policy development and advocacy. Akré is excited to teach courses on the effects of legal and policy contexts on people of color and LGBT populations, social determinants of health, health equity, and public health critical race praxis.
Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Akré was an assistant professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. She completed her postdoctoral training in the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University where she studied LGBT health disparities and aging. Her awards and honors include being inducted into the Lavender Leadership Honor Society in 2019, the first collegiate honor society focusing on leadership for LGBT social justice, and the Delta Omega Honor Society 2020, an honor society for studies in public health and received the Dartmouth College’s E.E. Just Faculty Fellowship Award, an award from the provost to support STEM research for early careers tenure track faculty of color. Ellesse was awarded a career development award from the Robert Wood John Foundation as a part of the Health Equity Scholar for Action program and is currently funded by NIH’s National Institute on Aging to use Medicare claims data to explore structural measures of inequity.
Akré earned a BA in psychology with a minor in Africana studies from San Diego State University, an MA in women’s health from Suffolk University in Boston, and a PhD in health services research from the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health.
