Brittany Michelle Charlton

Overview

Dr. Brittany Charlton is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's Department of Epidemiology. She is the Co-Director of the Harvard SOGIE (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Expression) Health Equity Research Collaborative.

Dr. Charlton’s primary research focus is reproductive health disparities among sexual and gender minorities. Her research has sustained continuous funding for the last decade from the NIH and foundations including the American Cancer Society. She has been the Principal Investigator on 18 grants and she collaborates with colleagues across the globe on a host of large-scale studies. Dr. Charlton has published nearly 50 original research papers—more than 30 of which she has been the first or senior author—in peer reviewed journals including the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and the American Journal of Public Health, as well as specialty journals including Pediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the Journal of Adolescent Health. Two of her papers in The BMJ ranked in the top 1% of most-read articles published in similar high-impact clinical journals. She is known internationally as a leading scholar documenting persistent and pronounced reproductive health disparities affecting sexual and gender minorities including disparities in unintended and teen pregnancies as well as cervical cancer screening. The second focal area of her research has been on contraception use and family planning among people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

In addition to Dr. Charlton’s research program, she co-leads Harvard SOGIE—a 75+ member collaborative that brings together internationally-recognized experts from diverse disciplines whose research focuses on the intersections of sexual orientation, gender identity, and health. Dr. Charlton has also individually mentored more than 35 scholars including junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and trainees. She founded Harvard’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Sexual Orientation and Reproductive Health Disparities Research and she has been the primary mentor on NIH-funded career development awards. Dr. Charlton leads formal classroom teaching in epidemiologic methods and reproductive health research across Harvard and its teaching hospitals. In the realm of medical education, she helps to lead efforts with Harvard Medical School's Sexual and Gender Minority Health Equity Initiative—a multi-year enterprise to enhance the ability of medical school students and faculty to provide evidence-based care by integrating sexual and gender minority health content across the curriculum.

Dr. Charlton holds a BA from The New School as well as an MSc and ScD from the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.