Dr Stella Arakelyan is a Research Fellow within the Advanced Care Research Centre (ACRC), Centre for Population Health Sciences, Usher Institute, Edinburgh University. She holds a Visiting Assistant Professor position with the Department of Public Health and Healthcare Organisation at Yerevan State Medical University after M. Heratsi.

Dr Arakelyan is a public health researcher and an MD by training with over 13 years of experience in public health promotion, chronic disease prevention and control, and health services research. Her research focuses on multimorbidity, patient care and support pathways, positive ageing, structural determinants of health, and health inequalities. Dr Arakelyan is currently co-designing hospital front door and community-based complex interventions aiming to imporve pathways of care and health outcomes for people with multiple long-term conditions in Scotland. She has expertise in applied mixed-method research methods, evidence synthesis, secondary analysis of large-scale datasets, and implementation research. 

Before joining the ACRC, Dr Arakelyan was a Lecturer at the School of Health Sciences (SHS), the University of Dundee, where she taught across multiple undergraduate and postgraduate modules (Global Citizenship and Health, Work-based Skills and Innovative Practices, Acute and Critical Care) and co-supervised MS dissertation students. Before this, she was a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Stirling where she was researching the impact of COVID-19 fear on the health, social and economic behaviours of older people in Scotland. As a Research Fellow at the Institute for Global Health and Development at Queen Margaret University, Dr Arakelyan worked in the NIHR Research Unit on Health in Situations of Fragility, contributing to multidisciplinary research projects exploring health systems responses to the prevention and management of non-communicable diseases in fragile settings. 

Dr Arakelyan holds a Ph.D. from the School of Health Sciences at Queen Margaret University (2020), an MSc in International Health jointly from Queen Margaret University and KIT Royal Tropical Institute (2015), a Master’s in Public Health from the School of Public Health, American University of Armenia (2007), and an M.D. from Yerevan State Medical University, Armenia (2003).