Shellie Ellis, MA, PhD

Shellie Ellis, MA, PhD, is an implementation scientist focused on improving cancer care delivery. Her work uses qualitative and quantitative research methods to understand how physician, practice, and policy characteristics influence physician behavior to design and implement interventions to transform care delivered to cancer patients.

Dr. Ellis has a Master’s degree in Anthropology and doctoral degree in Health Policy and Management. She worked for almost 20 years in a research and administrative capacity at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, leading nearly two dozen qualitative research studies involving patients and healthcare providers to explain patterns of suboptimal care, identify determinants of quality, develop and implement patient-reported outcome measures, and design user-centered interventions. Since completing the doctoral program in Health Policy and Management at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, she has focused on cancer care delivery. Her work has evaluated guideline adherence in prostate cancer (cited for its impact on citizens of North Carolina) and assessed physician, practice and policy factors related to overtreatment in prostate cancer. During her training, she was awarded an NCI-funded pre-doctoral fellowship in Cancer Care Quality and contributed to research to improve survivorship care delivery and colorectal cancer screening adherence. In her current faculty position at the University of Kansas, she has developed a portfolio of funded research which engages urologists to understand prostate cancer treatment decision making and delineates challenges and opportunities community urology practices face in delivering high quality urological cancer care. She was awarded an NCI-funded Mentored Training in Dissemination and Implementation Research in Cancer (MT-DIRC) fellowship in 2016 and is currently principal investigator of LEARN|INFORM|RECRUIT, a multi-modal intervention facilitating community urologists’ adherence to national guidelines to consider cancer treatment in the context of clinical trials.