Brittany Charlton

Dr. Brittany Charlton is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is the Founding Director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence—a partnership between the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute.

Additionally, Dr. Charlton is the Director of Faculty Development for the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. At the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, she is Co-Director of the Master of Science Program in Epidemiology. At the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, she is Co-Leader of the Cancer Epidemiology Program. Dr. Charlton is also on the faculty of The Fenway Institute, Boston Children's Hospital, and Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Dr. Charlton is known as a leading scholar of sexual and gender minority health inequities, particularly in cancer and reproductive health. The second focal area of her research is contraception use and family planning among people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. Her research has sustained continuous funding for the last 15 years from the NIH and foundations, including the American Cancer Society. She has been the Principal Investigator on 18 grants, including her most recent NIH-funded R01 award, focused on sexual orientation-related disparities in obstetrical and perinatal health. Additionally, she collaborates with colleagues across the globe on a host of large-scale studies. Dr. Charlton has published over 75 original research papers including in JAMA, BMJ, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and American Journal of Public Health. 

Further, Dr. Charlton leads several mentoring initiatives, particularly for underrepresented minorities. She is a Certified Facilitator through the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences and the founder of the Harvard Sexual and Gender Minority Health Mentoring Program. Dr. Charlton is an award-winning mentor who has mentored more than 50 early-career faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and trainees. In the classroom, Dr. Charlton is the Course Director for several classes across the university. In the realm of medical education, she is an alum of the Rabkin Fellowship in Medical Education, and she helps lead efforts at Harvard Medical School to integrate sexual and gender minority health content across the medical school curriculum.

Dr. Charlton received her MSc and ScD from the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.