Wendy Ellis, a nonresident fellow in the Research to Action Lab at the Urban Institute, is an assistant professor in global health and the founding director of the Center for Community Resilience at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University. Ellis has spent the past decade developing a “resilience movement” to address systemic inequities that contribute to social and health disparities that are often transmitted in families and communities from generation to generation.

In 2019, Ellis launched the Resilience Catalysts in Public Health using a novel framework that leverages local public health departments as chief health strategists in the resilience movement. Ellis holds several leadership positions in public health, including chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ Enhancing Community Resilience in the Gulf States Committee, scientific adviser to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Prevention and Injury Center, and the National Academies’ Culture of Health advisory board. In 2018, Ellis was selected as an Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow to support her leadership in developing cross-sector strategies to address childhood trauma, foster equity, and build community resilience. Ellis coauthored the article “A New Framework for Addressing Adverse Childhood and Community Experiences: The Building Community Resilience Model,” which can be found in the September 2017 issue of the Journal of Academic Pediatrics.