Gabe Murchison - Alumni Profile

I don't think my WGSS senior essay included a single table or calculation. Today, my work is much more quantitative and applied, sometimes verging on positivist! After college, I completed my MPH at the Yale School of Public Health, where I was introduced to the joys of biostatistics. I next worked for two years at a national LGBTQ advocacy organization before earning a PhD in Population Health Sciences at Harvard, focusing on interpersonal violence disparities between LGBTQ young people and their non-LGBTQ peers. I returned to Yale for my postdoctoral training, where two outstanding WGSS undergraduates made themselves indispensable to my research team. This past summer, I joined the Boston University School of Public Health as an Assistant Professor in Community Health Sciences and Epidemiology. My current project addresses transgender/nonbinary young adults' romantic relationship experiences.

While the methods I use now are quite different from those I learned in WGSS, my time in the department profoundly shaped what I do today. I pursued a research career because my WGSS professors took our undergraduate scholarship seriously, demanding rigor while providing the support we needed to achieve it. WGSS also taught me ways of thinking about science, power, and social change that continue to inform my work. In public health, we tend to think of "interventions" as being things like medication regimens, health apps, or social policy. From my WGSS training, I know that research itself can also be an intervention, helping to shift academic and cultural narratives around a social phenomenon. In that light, research highlighting young trans/nonbinary people's strengths and successes is not a distraction from the serious social marginalization the community faces but a meaningful challenge to that marginalization. Even in difficult times, those strengths and successes are abundant—and I'm grateful for the opportunity to make them more visible.

Gabe Murchison, PhD, MPH (they/she/he)