Dr. Andrisse grew up in Ferguson Missouri. Andrisse has said that he made poor decisions as a young person, and he was first arrested at the age of 14.  By his early twenties he had been sentenced to ten years in maximum security penitentiary.  During his time in prison, he was part of a drug rehabilitation program and was able to be released early. He was accepted to a doctoral program at Saint Louis University, and completed his PhD in 2014. After earning his doctorate he was appointed a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University Dr. Andrisse is now an endocrinologist and professor at Howard University College of Medicine, where he studies type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance.[2][4]

In 2017, Andrisse was named JustLeadership's Leading with Conviction Fellow. In this capacity, he works to reduce the prison population by 50% by  2030. Andrisse's first book, From Prison Cells to PhD: It is Never Too Late to Do Good, was published in 2021. He established a nonprofit program to provide mentoring to current and former incarcerated people so that they can start building their careers after leaving prison.

About the Director (fromprisoncellstophd.org)