Dr. Lee-Lee Ellis, PhD in Health Policy and Bioethics | Health Care Director at Arnold Ventures

In this episode, we discuss how Lee-Lee’s undergraduate interest in both medicine and philosophy eventually led her to pursue a PhD in health policy and bioethics, what prompted her to transition from a research role to working in healthcare policy and advocacy, and her take on the importance of networking and getting real-world work experience to help discover your passion and decide what career path is right for you.

Hosted by Brooklyn Arroyo

To connect with Lee-Lee and to learn more about her story, visit her page on the PHutures #100AlumniVoices Project website.

Transcript

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Brooklyn Arroyo

Hello I'm co-host Brooklyn Arroyo and this is 100 Alumni Voices podcast, stories that inspire, where we explore the personal and professional journeys of a diverse group of 100 doctoral alumni from Johns Hopkins University. Today we're joined by Lee-Lee Ellis, PhD in health policy and bioethics, currently working as Director of Healthcare at Arnold Ventures. So welcome to the PHutures Podcast. How are you today?

Lee-Lee Ellis

Hi Brooklyn. Thanks for having me. I’m doing well. How are you?

Brooklyn Arroyo

I'm doing good. Like we said before, we got started, it is currently Friday while we're recording, so Friday recordings are always best at the end of the week. But I would love to just jump right in and hear a little bit about your journey, about your academic journey specifically, and how you ended up within the PhD program of Health Policy and bioethics.

Lee-Lee Ellis

Sure, happy to talk about that. So, yeah, in my undergrad career, I was really interested in medicine. I took all the pre-Med classes, but I also took philosophy and philosophy was actually my major. And as I approached the end of my time in undergrad, I was kind of faced with like, what am I going to do with this philosophy degree? Do I want to pursue Med school? And, you know, I kind of started thinking about maybe there was a way to marry both of these interests. And that is really what led me to explore bioethics, which is essentially ethics applied to the realm of, you know, healthcare issues. And beyond that, it can include environmental ethics and things like that. And so, I actually went straight from undergrad into a relatively new master’s program that NYU had established for bioethics. And really, it was that opportunity where I started to think about ethics, not just in the context of how a patient and the doctor interacts, but these larger kind of systems questions about how we can think about making policies that are equitable and that abide by ethics principles that we care about that really led me to become more interested in these kind of wonky bioethics questions than in pursuing a career in medicine. And so, I then went straight from a master’s program into the Hopkins PhD program. And so, I was one of those people that just went straight through school. And then, you know, during my PhD, my friends were advancing in their careers, and I was like, oh, I'm still in school. But it definitely paid off and I had a wonderful experience at Hopkins and really was drawn to Hopkins by the incredible faculty at the Berman Institute of Bioethics. And that really brought in my horizons and and from there I entered the, you know, my professional path.

Brooklyn Arroyo

So generally, it was a pretty linear process for you and you you briefly mentioned how it was sort of the experience seeing some of your friends or peers or past peers go on to experience their careers and you were still within academia, and hadn't really gotten started yet. And so, what was that like for you? Did, did it ever make you question whether you had made the right decision? And and how did you go about existing in that really long track of academia that sometimes people want to achieve but they're scared of how daunting those amount of years are?

Lee-Lee Ellis

Oh, that's such a good question. You know, for me, I would say I'm a could be a lifelong student. I love my time and undergrad. I love being in classes with my peers. I love learning from professors. I love engaging with material, reading, and so I think that there's an option just to stay a student forever. I would have been quite attracted to that option, and so it definitely was a long process and towards the end you start to see kind of the light at the end of the tunnel and kind of what might be on the other side when you feel like you finally really get to apply everything you've learned in more of a real world setting, although quite a bit of that does go on during the process of getting a PhD because there are numerous opportunities to work with professors on their projects on their grant funded work or to get, you know, field experience depending on the area of study and so I do feel like you begin to get a taste of that. You know, I think the larger issue for me is that I was just so eager to pursue these areas of study that I kind of went full in to more training and and education without really thinking about what my career would look like. And I do think there are pros and cons to going straight through, but I definitely think there is value in taking some time to work after undergrad or after a Master’s program, even if you are thinking that ultimately you want a terminal degree, you wanna go get a PhD because that career experience, that experience working at a traditional job, a professional job is really helpful and also can help spark areas of interest or focus areas that you aren't aware of when you go all the way through. And so, I did see first-hand how some of my peers and my PhD cohort kind of came into the PhD with a bit more focus on the areas that they were really passionate about. For me it took a little bit longer to kind of get there to figure out what I wanted to study for my dissertation project, for example. And so, you know, I think there are lots of different ways to end up in the same path and I'm glad I did the way I did, but I do find myself encouraging other students to spend some time working before pursuing something like a PhD.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And that is good advice from the experience you've had just to be able to have a little bit more understanding about what it is you're interested in like you're saying and and so within your time when you were transitioning out of academia and you were first stepping into this career area, what did that transition period look like for you? Was it a smooth transition? Was there a learning curve that had to take place on the difference between implementing this work within a field and the more academic aspects of this study and and how did that look for you?

Lee-Lee Ellis

Yeah, I think it was a really exciting time, because especially at the end of, you know, five years in a PhD program you're kind of ready to enter the job market, you know, enter a you know, more traditional career. For me, that process was relatively smooth. I think one thing that you don't really feel when you begin the PhD, but you certainly feel, at least I did by the end of it, is that like you really are an expert on the area that you have studied. And of course, we are all going to continue learning and honing our areas of expertise over the course of our careers, but in terms of, you know, for example, like a dissertation or master’s thesis project, like you're one of the people that knows the most about that topic now, because you've done the hard work of researching and so being able to transition into a career where I was directly working on the same topic as the focus of my studies during my PhD program really gave me confidence that this was work I could do and that work that I could meaningfully contribute to in a team setting. And it was really nice to kind of have more of a regular work day. I mean, during the pandemic, that's all kind of been turned on its head. But the time that I was finishing with PhD long before COVID, you know, it was nice to not have a couple of hours of reading every night and just say, oh no, I work during the day and now I have my evenings back. So, there are definitely some perks as well.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Definitely yes, being a student is a job in its own right. There's not necessarily hours in the day, and that's when you work. It's oftentimes 24/7. So, you you briefly mentioned how you were fortunate to be able to have a job that's pretty parallel to what you were studying, specifically within your PhD. And So, what now does your day-to-day look like and how does implementing you know health policy and bioethics look like within your field?

Lee-Lee Ellis

Yeah, that's a great question. Well, I should say I'm not at the job that I started out at when I first completed my PhD and have had a couple different experiences since then. But the role that I'm at now has been a really fun way to think about the different opportunities we have to incorporate ethics in our work that might not be as immediately apparent as for example being a bioethics professor, where of course it's very evident that that work is going to have a huge ethics to dimension. So right now, I'm at an organization called Arnold Ventures which is a philanthropy that is really focused on driving policy changes and the areas of health policy that I focus on are around changing the way that we pay physicians and improving the Medicare program. The Medicare program is one of the largest social insurance programs we have in this country serving providing healthcare coverage to people aged 65 and older and those with disabilities, so it has a huge impact on the federal budget and a huge impact on people's lives and it's something we all hope one day to to have ourselves as we age into the program and so thinking about ways that can make that program stronger, both from a financial standpoint and in terms of the benefits it provides, people see, it feels to me very germane to some of the questions of ethics that we grapple with in bioethics, like how do we make this this benefit serve everyone equitably? How do we think about balancing the needs of the people who are in the program now versus the needs of future generations who, if this program is not financially sustainable, might be paying into the program now, but won't be able to access it if we don't reform it now? And so those are just some of the questions that I feel have really been a nice way for even though I'm not directly working in ethics per se, for me to be able to incorporate an ethics framework into the work I do and thinking about the work that we want to fund and whether or not we think it will be meaningful for advancing the policy discussion as well as kind of our policy agenda and the areas that we really want to push and overall, you know the framework that Arnold Ventures Healthcare portfolio operates under is really trying to make healthcare more affordable and reduce costs in our healthcare system, which I think inherently also has an ethics dimension so that people can really enjoy what I consider to be a a moral right, which is access to healthcare.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And and ethics in general has a very strong backbone, I think of advocacy and and so is that something that you identify with and were consciously pursuing within your academic and professional pursuits? Were you always someone who was passionate about having a a lasting and positive impact on the communities around you? Or did it sort of just happen by accident? 

Lee-Lee Ellis

You know it's funny, I thought a lot about this question of research versus advocacy and kind of where you draw the line and what is the role of the researcher. I certainly felt during my studies and in my first job out of my PhD program, which was a very traditional research role, that our job as researchers were really to provide rigorous evidence on an issue to lay it out in a way that policymakers could stand and kind of leave it for them to decide what to do with it, and in some ways that's very empowering because you're providing information that is not biased. You don't have a particular agenda that you're trying to advance, and I think that that can be important for the work to be viewed as credible and to be taken up. But it does limit you because you're not out there saying in light of this work like clearly the option is this option A. That's what the policymakers should implement. And I think eventually that was one of the reasons that drove me to consider other career opportunities after my time as a researcher, which I did for about 6 years and really loved that experience and learned so much from it, but ultimately wanted to drive policy in a way that I felt like I could use additional tools that were not at my disposal as a researcher, and so the move to Arnold Ventures, I've been there about a year and a half now, has really enabled me to access a whole suite of tools to advance policy change. I'm able to combine research and policy development with communications and direct advocacy. Arnold Ventures as an LLC, and so they are able to fund advocacy related work as well. And so, it feels really nice that I can take that, take the work that I'm interested in pursuing a step further by saying here is the evidence and then let me tell you why this particular option is the best option, and let me connect you with our grantees, who are really the expert and can tell you more about this. So, I completely agree, you know, I think everyone has a personal choice of kind of how much advocacy they wanna engage in. But for me, it's been really nice to have an opportunity in this new position now to do more direct advocacy and be able to say like we are taking a stand and this is our position and we are recommending these things.

Brooklyn Arroyo

So, you briefly mentioned in the beginning how you always sort of were interested with pre-Med. You took a lot of pre-Med classes and had originally thought or somewhat thought that that was the path that you were going to take. And so, you obviously ended up down a different but similar field and what advice would you have for someone who is interested in the relative subject area of medicine and health and is unsure if the straightforward medical school path is right for them?

Lee-Lee Ellis

Yeah, I think this is advice that I give to people when I go back to my undergrad which is a liberal arts college, is really to talk to folks in various careers within the field of interest, whether it's medicine or finance or you know, something in the humanities. There are, I think, sometimes so many other interesting elements of that work and career paths that just I think are not visible to the typical 20-year-old sitting in a social studies class or wherever it might be. And really, the only way to know about those positions are through talking to people or I would say also having you know having that first job out of college or out of your Master’s program, where you're able to kind of get a lay of the land of like who are the stakeholders in this space? What are the organizations here? What are the different roles in those organizations? What are the parts of my job that I like or don't like? And now let me try to marry that up with what I know is out there. I completely agree, like I didn't even really know about public health when I was in an undergrad. It just was not an area that I was exposed to through to discussions with alumni or through kind of visitors brought to campus, and I think we all have those blinders. It's just the nature of the world we live in and kind of the the paths that we take. So, anything we can do to kind of remove those blinders and try to just at the very least expose ourselves to the other things out there I think can be really informative in deciding like what we're most passionate about and what we want to pursue. You know, I think that if I had been told in high school, like, you're going to be interested in that. But you're gonna end up working for a philanthropy on health policy. I would have been like, what? I don't even understand that. So, it is a it is a process, but I think it applies definitely beyond beyond medicine and just really to any field of study to encourage those in undergrad to try to get a little bit of a lay of the land through any avenue they're able to as they think about what career they want and to not be so locked in. I mean, I think that's the other thing that's really wonderful about that time that you're in undergraduate studies. You have a lot of resources available to you and time to sort of decide what you want to do. So, it's not something you need to rush into.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And it's from many conversations throughout this podcast, and even just from this podcast alone, it's proven time and time again that careers are not as solid as I think a lot of people especially young people, we assume that they are. You sort of go to school and then you fall into your career and you do that for the next 50 years. And really, it's all a lot more fluid and there's a lot more, you know, transitions that take place and we oftentimes progress in ways that we didn't foresee ourselves progressing. And so, for you, if if this is something you've even considered yet, what would the next phase of your career look like?

Lee-Lee Ellis

Wow, I completely agree. It's not linear. I think for me each you know each new position I've taken on has focused on the area that I find most interesting in my job and find found a way to kind of exploit it or advance it. And so, you know, right out from undergrad I or from excuse me, right after my I finished my PhD I went into a research role, but it was the policy piece that really intrigued me and I'm in more of a policy role and I think of that I will probably continue working in the policy space, but that does that is a pretty broad space. It could be advocacy, it could be something more related to communications. Within policy, there's federal policy and state policy and work happening at the local level even. And so, I definitely wouldn't rule out while right now I've really focused on federal policy with my work on Medicare, I wouldn't rule out future opportunities down the road to do something more at the state level or to do more advocacy related work, so I do definitely feel, even though I may be approaching mid-career that the world is my oyster and there could be some interesting twists and turns ahead.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And like you said, policy is a very broad area. There's a lot of work being done by a lot of different professionals. So, they're within that one area of of study or area of work you can do a wide variety of things and and progress in a lot of different ways. So, the grand finale of each episode is the same question for everyone, and that is what inspires you right now?

Lee-Lee Ellis

Oh wow, that is a big question and I find myself thinking about so many things that inspire me. But I think what immediately came to mind and I'm sitting here looking at my desk. I have these gun control now pins and gun violence is a public health issue. I don't do any work on gun violence, but I look at that area of active area of policy discussion right now and I continue to find it so inspiring. You know, when I was in high school, I went to a school just down the road from Columbine High School at the same time that that shooting occurred. And to think of that was, you know, 20 years ago and where are we today experiencing the same level of violence and even worse and very little has changed on the policy front. And I think what has in particular inspired me about kind of the gun control and gun violence reform efforts is just these young people who have become so engaged in the issue and and certainly after Parkland seeing those students organize a rally which I participated in in DC and kind of the ongoing work that is happening on that space makes me really excited. And I know there are some real challenging barriers regarding, like recent Supreme Court decisions and just some some general uncertainty about what policies are going to be viable in this kind of new world that we live in, but I think that effort is continuing full, you know, full steam ahead and I'm really excited to see what comes of it. It's something that I'm passionate about, even though it's not an area I worked on and just continue to see all the important voices working in that space and the slow progress that they're making is is inspiring.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And and policy and advocacy and just everything happening in our world right now and in our nation, there is a lot to be worried about or intrigued by the the nature of how it seems to be getting worse, or at least not getting better. But it is definitely inspiring consistently seeing people show up and show out in the communities that are being built in solidarity with some of these issues, so I appreciate you bringing that up and and making note of that within the PHutures Podcast. And thank you for coming and speaking with me today.

Lee-Lee Ellis

Brooklyn, thank you for having me. It's been so fun to reminisce about some of these topics, and I'm really excited to have an opportunity to engage with our wonderful alumni network. And of course, always happy to chat with any interested student who wants to think more about what might be next for them.