Posted by anderc8 on Wednesday, January 17, 2018 in News, TIPs 2017.

Written by Stephanie Wang, Vanderbilt Class of 2021

As a way to introduce you to faculty from the LGBT Policy Lab, first-year student Stephanie Wang will interview a different faculty member approximately each month and write a brief faculty profile. Stephanie reached out to the Vanderbilt LGBT Policy Lab prior to her arrival on campus this fall, as she is passionate about the issues being addressed in the TIPS project. Stephanie arrived at Vanderbilt from Pittsburgh, where she was active in a political activism organization, a robotics team, the varsity swim team as well as several writing publications. She plans to major in Computer Science.  At Vanderbilt, she writes for the Hustler, the Slant and the Vanderbilt Political Review. She is also involved with the Engineering Council and the Community Building, Outreach and Diversity Committee of Vanderbilt Student Government.  

To inform each Vanderbilt LGBT Policy Lab faculty profile, Stephanie is asking a range of questions, such as: What is the faculty member’s background? How did the faculty member become interested in research on LGBT public policies? How are LGBT issues treated in the faculty member’s broader academic discipline? The fourth faculty member to be profiled in this series is Jesse Ehrenfeld, professor of Anesthesiology.

In addition to serving as an anesthesiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld is a faculty member at the Vanderbilt School of Medicine as a professor of anesthesiology, surgery, biomedical informatics and health policy. He also manages the LGBTI Health Program and conducts research. Dr. Ehrenfeld is also a Commander in the United States Navy where he does LGBT health work for the Department of Defense to advocate for LGBT service members. Furthermore, Dr. Ehrenfeld serves as the first openly gay member of the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association, and, since his election in 2014, has been extremely influential in shaping AMA’s policies regarding important LGBT issues.

With an interest LGBT health and a background in academic medicine, Dr. Ehrenfeld has dedicated most of his research to access of care and outcomes of patients who identify as LGBTQIA. His research has received financial support from organizations like the National Institutes for Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

His current research seeks to identify the disparities between the quality of care delivered to LGBT people. As patients come into and out of the healthcare system, there’s variances in their experiences, and Dr. Ehrenfeld seeks to determine what these variances mean and why they exist with the ultimate goal of developing strategies to reduce and eliminate them. He also looks at the genomics of gender identity, seeking to understand what the genomic contributions to gender identity are. With a project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Meharry Medical College, Dr. Ehrenfeld is looking at the oral health disparities for LGBT individuals. He wants to understand why LGBT people seek dental care at lower rates than non-LGBT people and then develop strategies for community outreach to reduce that gap.

Beyond his research, Dr. Ehrenfeld co-wrote the nation’s second clinical text on LGBT health titled Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Healthcare. Used in hospitals across the nation, it’s currently used as one of two reference texts explaining how to care for LGBT patients. Under Dr. Ehrenfeld’s leadership, Trans Buddy, the nation’s first patient navigator initiative for transgender and gender-nonconforming people to improve their healthcare outcomes, was launched.

Recognizing that most clinicians weren’t taught how to take care of LGBT people or educated on the unique health differences between LGBT people and non-LGBT people in their training or schooling, Dr. Ehrenfeld is helping to eliminate the knowledge gap by creating online content, textbooks and other resources addressing it. He also leads the LGBT Health Certificate Program for Vanderbilt graduate students. For his work on the film “Transgender at War and in Love,” which documents the lives of transgender service members, Dr. Ehrenfeld was a 2016 EMMY nominee, received a 2015 White House News Photographers Association Award and earned a GLAAD Media Award. Ultimately, Dr. Ehrenfeld wants people to receive the best health outcomes regardless of their sexual identity, and he’s dedicated himself to achieve that.

On the importance of LGBT research, Dr. Ehrenfeld said, “There are tremendous gaps in our knowledge as to how to take care of LGBT people, how to make sure LGBT people are welcomed in our healthcare facilities. Frankly, there are health differences unique to LGBT people that most clinicians aren’t aware of—and most LGBT people aren’t aware of. So, work needs to be done understand how we can reach out to both the healthcare community and the LGBT community to ensure everyone understands how to optimize the health of all sex and gender minorities.”