About Bernie Ellis

Biography

Bernard H. Ellis, Jr., MA, MPH, is the principal researcher and founder of Bernard Ellis and Associates, Inc. Mr. Ellis is a consultant epidemiologist with over twenty years in substance abuse-related research, program development and administration. He specializes in epidemiological research strategies to assess public health program development, delivery and effectiveness. During his career, Mr. Ellis has held research and program management positions with two federal agencies (NIH and CDC) and with three state governments (Tennessee, New Mexico and Wyoming). His areas of research and programmatic involvement include substance abuse and HIV/AIDS-related epidemiological research at the tribal, state and federal level.

During Mr. Ellis’ career, he has been involved in a number of ground-breaking efforts. As a member of the Information Projects Branch in the National Cancer Institute, Mr. Ellis was responsible for developing a medical office-based smoking cessation approach which was used by over 10% of U.S. physicians and over 20% of U.S. dentists to assist their smoking patients to quit. He was a principal consultant in the public and professional education efforts surrounding the release of Nicorette, the first prescription drug licensed to assist smokers to address their nicotine addiction while quitting smoking. In the late 1980s, Mr. Ellis served as the Program Director for HIV/AIDS Surveillance/Seroprevalence for the Tennessee AIDS Program. During his tenure there, AIDS case reporting increased over 600% in Tennessee; and the research efforts he directed were responsible for testing over 110,000 persons annually in a number of sentinel populations within which the HIV/AIDS epidemic was being tracked. In the early 1990s, Mr. Ellis was responsible for organizing the first research unit within any U.S. state health department devoted to studying substance abuse as a public health problem for the New Mexico Department of Health. That work led him to assist four other states in developing similar research programs and to serve as an expert consultant on substance abuse to the U.S. Congress through the GAO’s Office of Technology Assessment.

Recent projects have included providing consultant support for Wyoming’s Methamphetamine Initiative, a statewide effort which was highlighted by the U.S. Department of Justice in its Practitioner Perspectives series: http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/bja/186266.pdf Mr. Ellis has also managed the Wyoming Substance Abuse Treatment Needs Assessment Project, a four-year, $1.3 million research project which involved the administration and oversight of eleven separate statewide studies in Wyoming; he designed and implemented the Alabama Substance Abuse Treatment Outcome and Process (STOP) study, which utilized eight separate statewide administrative database linkages to track treatment outcomes for over 11,000 state-supported patients; and he designed and conducted the ongoing monitoring of substance abuse trends in McKinley County, NM – once the worst county in the U.S. for substance abuse-related mortality and now a model of community change – through the “Taking the Long View” series of research reports.

Mr. Ellis has authored numerous publications on public health strategies and performance of current efforts to reduce tobacco use, cancer, HIV/AIDS and substance abuse. In addition, he has provided consultant support to almost 100 major national and state governmental and private organizations in the past two decades. Mr. Ellis earned his BA in Psychology, Sociology and Political Science from Vanderbilt University, an MA in Sociology (Demography and Human Ecology) from the University of Texas at Austin and an MPH (Public Health Education and Epidemiology) from the University of California at Berkeley. He also has additional graduate training in Sociology (Vanderbilt) and Health Communication, Health Promotion and Medical Anthropology (Stanford).