Dr. Kellan E. Baker is the Executive Director of the Whitman-Walker Institute, the research, policy, and education arm of Whitman-Walker, a community health system in Washington, D.C. Kellan is a health services researcher, educator, and health policy professional with wide expertise in health equity research and policy, particularly with regard to sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations. Previously he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he worked in close collaboration with federal Executive Branch agencies such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on activities that included conducting research on health care access barriers that was cited in several federal nondiscrimination regulations; advancing new initiatives for collecting sexual orientation and gender identity data through federally supported surveys, electronic medical records, and administrative data systems; and serving as a founding Steering Committee Member of Out2Enroll, a training and outreach campaign in partnership with HHS and the White House to connect low-income SGM people with health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
Kellan was a member of the AcademyHealth Advisory Group on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Health Services Research, and he also served as a consultant for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on a landmark 2020 study assessing the health and well-being of LGBTQI+ populations. He is an appointed member of a National Academies consensus study committee that developed standards for the collection of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation data by the National Institutes of Health in 2022, and he holds appointments as associate faculty in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the George Washington University and the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Kellan received his Ph.D. in health policy and management from Johns Hopkins, where he was a Centennial Scholar and a Health Policy Research Scholar; an M.P.H. in health policy and M.A. in international development from George Washington University; and a B.A. with high honors in astrophysics and Russian from Swarthmore College.