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{shortcode-3f3e57005be88db1897fbe0aab6a26f27b883007}rittany M. Charlton was standing in the hallway of a New York bank when her phone buzzed. She had just left a fundraising event, speaking to prospective donors for the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence.
Her mentor at Harvard Medical School was on the other line. The news: one of Charlton’s grants from the NIH — a multiyear R61 awarding her more than $800,000 in fiscal year 2024 alone — had just been terminated. It was March 12, less than a year since Charlton started her center.
“I was sort of unfazed,” Charlton tells me.
Charlton, who holds associate professor appointments in the Harvard School of Public Health Epidemiology department and the HMS Population Medicine department, had anticipated funding cuts to the center since January. On the day President Donald Trump was sworn in, his administration issued an executive order announcing that “federal funds should not promote gender ideology.” This eventually led to further announcements that the NIH would rescind grants that contained any form of “DEI language,” including research on LGBTQ and gender identity.
Charlton’s R61 grant, which enabled her to conduct research on how discriminatory laws impacted LGBTQ teen’s mental health, included words like “gender affirming care,” “minority-serving institution,” “lesbian gay bisexual,” and “discrimination” in its project terms.
For the past two months, she has been reaching out to journalists and news stations in an attempt to draw mainstream attention to NIH’s budget plans. A number of her colleagues’ funding already faced cuts as part of the Trump administration’s larger assault on scientific research, with plans to slash $4 billion in funding by the end of the year. In an all-consuming news cycle, Charlton worried that these stories would get buried.
She was in New York because she was afraid her center might be a target. The news, though a shock, was not unexpected. A little over a week later on Friday, Charlton received another call informing her that the NIH had cut the rest of her grants.
For Charlton, the center was meant to be her big break. She had spent years climbing the academic ladder, trying to convince others that her research — and LGBTQ health in general — mattered. The NIH grants, which totaled upwards of $5 million, were meant to further Charlton’s research.
In January, speaking out would have endangered both Charlton’s professional work and threatened the center’s longevity. However, when the funding cuts were announced, Charlton felt she had nothing to lose. She made the decision to fire her executive director, who had only joined the team a few months ago. On April 2, she sued the NIH.
In the lawsuit, Charlton, alongside three other researchers, the American Public Health Association, and the United Automobile Workers, called for the grants to be reinstated. The funding cuts, they argue, are fundamentally unconstitutional. Since then, Charlton has been speaking extensively to journalists on the record about her grant terminations.
“I had a lot of privilege, and I still do. It’ll be me,” she says about her openness to speak in the press. “Because there needs to be a face to this.”
{shortcode-34e8f2b114f673286f89210f17c56443a91cd7ed}harlton and I spoke a little less than a month after she filed her suit. She asks to meet at the Shake Shack in Harvard Square — a chance to talk and simultaneously eat dinner.
She’s running late, but texts that I will recognize her by her “black Patagonia jacket, black backpack, black shoes, and black glasses…sounds goth-like but I have more of a corporate Barbie look.” When we enter the restaurant, she picks up her order — fries, a burger, and a shake — as she explains that she had been caught up on a call on the way here.
We find a spot on the second floor of the restaurant. She jokes with the waiters and, at least outwardly, barely seems frazzled. Still, she speaks frankly about her difficulties: Since March, she’s had to fire all of the center’s staff. She’s found new jobs for 17 of the 18 staff members, but says she still feels like she let her team down. “I failed that one person,” she says, “because I had no time.”
“Now that my grants are gone, I got nothing,” she adds. “Harvard’s not stepping in. Harvard Medical School is not stepping in. The School of Public Health is not stepping in.”
In an email statement to The Crimson, a Harvard Medical School spokesperson noted that while Charlton’s has academic appointments to HMS and HSPH, her primary place of employment is at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. “Professor Charlton’s grants do not go through HMS,” the email stated.
“The loss of funding is a deeply distressing development that forces unimaginable choices,” the spokesperson added.
A year prior, Charlton had decided to focus on expanding her center rather than applying for full professorship. The center — one of Charlton’s long-term goals — meant to culminate a career in advocacy and public health.
Growing up with a mother as a nurse and numerous relatives in the medical field, Charlton says she learned to talk about “social justice through a medical lens.” When Charlton was six, her mom and sisters gifted her the book “Our Body, Ourselves,” a text in women’s health published in 1970 and hailed as groundbreaking. This text initiated what became a decades-long interest in reproductive health.
Charlton attended the New School, a left-leaning college that allowed her to study LGBTQ health; her senior thesis focused on hate crimes committed by the New York Police Department against transgender people. She graduated in two years and decided to enter the workforce. “I wanted to just have some life experience before I became an academic,” she explains.
She worked on Capitol Hill for a few years, as a political strategist and fundraiser. A stint in AmeriCorps, however, led her back to the healthcare field. “I really, really believe every American who can, anyone in any country, should do service,” she tells me. “But I’m a pacifist, so I wasn’t going to join the military.” For a year, she worked at New York’s LGBT Callen-Lorde Community Health Center as a birth doula and HIV counselor. Following her service, she headed to graduate school at HSPH.
Attending Harvard was also a deliberate choice. “I was like, I’m gonna go to Harvard. I’m gonna get the best quantitative training I can ever get. So no one can tell me that I’m not smart enough, quantitative enough,” she says. At HSPH, she received her Master of Science and Doctor of Science in Epidemiology.
“I tried to be a rebel and not become a nurse, obviously. And then I became an epidemiologist,” she jokes. Charlton has been at Harvard ever since, working at HMS, Boston Children’s Hospital, and her current position at the HSPH.
But she says she had different aspirations when she first arrived on campus: “I wanted to be Harvard’s president. But that’s not what I want. I don’t want to be in the position that Alan Garber is in right now. I don’t ever want to be making decisions for corporations.”
I ask her about something she said the last time we called — about how she had “played by the rules” for most of her academic career.
“I wanted to prove, I guess, to Harvard, but whoever else, that I was valuable. And that not only could I get NIH dollars, but I also could write foundation awards,” she says. Eventually, she secured enough funding to launch the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence in 2024. In the center’s early days, the initiative was hailed as one of the first of its kind at Harvard.
In an address, Andrea Baccarelli — the dean of faculty at HSPH — lauded the center. “Addressing the longstanding inequities in LGBTQ health is critical, and we are proud to be part of this important work,” he said. Newsletters and announcements published in various Harvard outlets said the center arrived at just the right moment, as attacks on LGBTQ health worsened across the country.
But less than a year later, when the grants were cut, Charlton says she was more or less left on her own.
“The point is I really feel like I did all the right things. And I even started a center with some philanthropic dollars on the order of six figures,” she says. “It’s gone and, again, I played by the rules, and now I’m pretty screwed.”
{shortcode-dd08abb0bb2b02bf4881baaa9fb305566107f8d4}he first warning signs emerged over a year before the center opened. When Project 2025 first came out in April 2023, Charlton found herself scouring the nearly 900-page document.
“I just wanted to be ready for what was coming,” she says.
Published by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 includes a number of policy recommendations ranging from foreign economics to public education. The preface to the document stated that the project “is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.”
More specifically, the document called for the next administration to break up NIH grant funding and to stop “pushing junk gender science.” So when Trump was elected to office the following year, Charlton thought she would at least be somewhat prepared for the onslaught of deregulations that came.
“Even reading Project 2025, two years ago, I knew that I would start to have to go and get philanthropic dollars and start to go back to foundations,” she tells me.
Now, with her grants terminated, Charlton has entertained other career paths beyond academia. But she does not want to leave the center behind in its current state. She has continued to fight the NIH in the courts, filing a preliminary injunction alongside other plaintiffs on April 25. This legal move would request the court to halt the implementation of grant terminations until the court’s final judgment.
At the same time, she is searching for private donors and philanthropy to keep the center running.
“It’s important to me, and it’s important to me that that lives beyond me as an individual,” she says. “And if I leave right now, that won’t happen. This will just disappear.”
Corrections: May 5, 2025
A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Brittany M. Charlton as an assistant professor in the Harvard School of Public Health epidemiology department. In fact, Charlton is an associate professor and also holds an appointment at Harvard Medical School.
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Charlton was on the phone with a mentor from HSPH when she learned one of her grants from the National Institutes of Health had been terminated. In fact, she was on the phone with a mentor from HMS.
A previous version of this article incorrectly escribed Charlton’s prior roles at HMS and the Boston Children’s Hospital as staff positions. In fact, she was not classified as staff.
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Charlton’s primary employer is Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. In fact, her primary employer is the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute.
Clarification: May 5, 2025
This article has been updated to clarify that one of Charlton’s NIH grants is worth more than $800,000 in fiscal year 2024 but substantially more over its lifetime.
—Magazine writer Claire Jiang can be reached at claire.jiang@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @_clairejiang_.
