Ellis Adjei Adams

Ellis Adjei Adams is an associate professor of geography and environmental policy at the Keough School of Global Affairs. He is affiliated with the University of Notre Dame’s Environmental Change Initiative and the Eck Institute for Global Health. Adams has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 2020.

Adams specializes in environmental policy; water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH); water policy and governance; gender, water, and development; cities; political ecology; and sub-Saharan Africa. Trained as a human environmental geographer with expertise in the natural and social sciences, his work focuses on understanding human-water interactions in different urban contexts in the Global South, including urban water insecurity. 

Adams’ fieldwork has focused on Ghana, Malawi, and Uganda, with emerging interests in Brazil and the United States. He is a co-principal investigator on the National Science Foundation-funded project “Analyzing the Magnitude, Variability, and Governance of Infrastructure-Mediated Flows in Urban Watersheds,” and his research has been published in journals including Geoforum, Political Geography, and Land Use Policy.

Before coming to Notre Dame, Adams was an assistant professor of global studies and geosciences at Georgia State University. He received the 2020 Distinguished Emerging Scholar Award in African Geography from the Association of American Geographers and was a co-recipient of the Nabuo Maeda International Research Award from the American Public Health Association. He is consulting for the World Bank to develop a WASH and Health Index for Africa.

Adams earned an MS in environmental policy from Michigan Tech University and a PhD in geography, environment, and spatial sciences from Michigan State University.

ISP Advisee:
Anna Mittag

KDR Assistant(s):
Haley Hinkel
Akash Nooka