Ellen-Marie Whelan

Associate Director of Health Policy and Senior Health Policy Analyst

Ellen-Marie Whelan, NP, PhD is a Senior Health Policy Analyst and Associate Director of Health Policy at American Progress. She is currently working on health care reform and focuses on changing how we pay for health care, primary care, care coordination, comparative effectiveness and workforce issues. Prior to joining CAP she was a health policy advisor on Capitol Hill for five years, health services researcher, and practiced as nurse practitioner for over a decade. She started an adolescent primary care clinic in a community center in West Philadelphia.

On Capitol Hill, Ellen-Marie was the Staff Director for the Subcommittee on Retirement and Aging to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions with Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-MD) for four years. The subcommittee has oversight over issues including: pensions, long-term care issues, family caregiving and general health of the aging population. In this role she also covered Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP and the FDA for Senator Mikulski. Ellen-Marie came to Congress as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow for the 2003-2004 academic year, where she was a legislative aide to Democratic Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD).

Before coming to D.C., Ellen-Marie was an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, where she held a joint appointment with the Urban Health Institute and the School of Nursing and was on faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, where she started a primary care teen clinic in a community center. For this effort she received the Secretary’s Award for Innovations in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, presented by former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala and was one of the first nurse practitioners in Pennsylvania to obtain an individual Medicaid provider number. Her research focused on academic–community partnerships, safety-net providers, and primary care.

Ellen-Marie holds a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a master’s degree and Ph.D in nursing and health policy from the University of Pennsylvania and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in primary care policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.