Dr Stella Arakelyan is an Advanced Care Research Centre (ACRC) Fellow, Vivensa Foundation Fellow and Edinburgh Scientific Academic Track (ESAT) Fellow at Usher Institute, Edinburgh University. She holds a Visiting Associate Professor position with the Department of Public Health and Healthcare Organisation at Yerevan State Medical University. 

Dr Arakelyan is a public health researcher and an MD by training with over 15 years of experience in health promotion, (multiple) long-term conditions prevention and management, and health services research. Dr Arakelyan currently uses participatory and systems thinking methods with patients, caregivers, health and social care professionals, and wider stakeholders to explore systems problems and co-produce complex interventions to optimise health and care services for people with multimorbidity.  She has expertise in participatory and mixed-method research methods, evidence and knowledge 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 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, an MSc in International Health jointly from Queen Margaret University and KIT Royal Tropical Institute, a Master’s in Public Health from the School of Public Health, American University of Armenia, and an M.D. from Yerevan State Medical University, Armenia.