Lee Ellington is a tenured Associate Professor in the College of Nursing, a clinical psychologist, and a teacher in the nursing doctoral program at the University of Utah. She is an investigator at the Huntsman Cancer Institute and a member of the Cancer Control and Population Sciences Program.Dr. Ellington has an interdisciplinary program of research in patient-provider communication. She has studied interpersonal health communication in a range of health care contexts and among diverse groups of health care providers, including family practice, cancer genetic counseling, poison control, and hospice home care for cancer patients. Her focus is on the communication mechanisms in patient-provider interactions which predict adherence, coping, health behaviors, psychosocial adjustment. In particular, she is interested in provider communication which facilitates the cognitive and emotional processing of health information.Currently, Dr. Ellington’s primary focus is on the study of home-based family caregivers of cancer patients and their communication with hospice nurses. Her team is examining 1) the change in physical, psychological, and spiritual nurse-caregiver communication over the course of home-based hospice visits, 2) the nature of family caregiver-nurse reciprocity in communication, and 3) the development of participant-informed, theoretically-guided interventions for caregivers and hospice nurses. She is expanding this research to the communication of hospice and palliative care teams with families.Ellington earned her master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her PhD from the University of Utah.

Provider/Client Communication Cancer Clinical Genetics Communication Expression of Emotion in Medical Settings Clinical Health Psychology