SGMRO Research Investigator Awards Event

Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld is a board-certified physician anesthesiologist with a background in clinical research, advocacy, and health care policy. He currently is a professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He serves as Director of Education Research for the Vanderbilt Office of Health Sciences Education, Associate Director of the Anesthesiology & Perioperative Informatics Research Division, and Director of the Vanderbilt Program for LGBTQ Health. He also is the Chair-Elect of the American Medical Association Board of Trustees. Dr. Ehrenfeld’s research interests include biomedical informatics and the application of information technology to increase patient safety and reduce health care disparities, studying how information technology can improve overall system reliability and performance. He currently serves in the U.S. Navy and as an Adjunct Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. He also has served as a special advisor to the 20th U.S. Surgeon General. In recognition of his staunch LGBTQ health advocacy, he received a 2015 White House News Photographers Association Award and was a GLAAD Media Award nominee and Emmy nominee in 2016.

Dr. Annesa Flentje is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing. She is a clinical psychologist who focuses on reducing health disparities among sexual and gender minority individuals. Her research has targeted multiple ways to reduce these disparities, including prevention, increasing the visibility of sexual and gender minorities in research, and improving mental health and substance abuse services for sexual and gender minorities. Her current research is identifying the relationship between minority stress, substance use, and biological functioning at the molecular level (i.e., gene expression and DNA methylation). She has developed an individually delivered intervention to reduce minority stress among sexual minority men and is investigating it as a means to reduce substance use and improve the physical and mental health of sexual minority people (K23DA039800). Dr. Flentje also is an Associate Director of The PRIDE Study, a prospective, national, longitudinal study of the health of sexual and gender minority individuals within the United States that has enrolled more than 12,000 sexual and gender minority people to date.