Postdoctoral Training, Epidemiology, Harvard Medical School & Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
PhD, Epidemiology, The Ohio State University
MS, Global Health, Duke University
BS, Neuroscience, Duke University
Payal Chakraborty is an Assistant Professor of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and core faculty in the UNC Center for Thriving Communities.
Dr. Chakraborty is an epidemiologist whose research focuses on understanding the impact of structural marginalization (e.g., discriminatory policies, restrictive reproductive health policies) on disparities in sexual and reproductive health outcomes in various populations. Her research spans topics across the reproductive justice spectrum. For example, she has conducted research quantifying use of nonpreferred contraceptive methods, impacts of restrictive reproductive health policies on accessing care, and disparities in adverse pregnancy outcomes among LGB+ populations. Dr. Chakraborty is also interested in applying causal inference methods as well as cross-disciplinary methodologies (e.g., natural language processing) to quantify health disparities and their mechanisms. She is Principal Investigator of a grant from the NIH Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development studying sexual orientation related disparities in unintended pregnancies, and how these disparities differ by multiple social locations as well as by the structural environments in which people live. The overall goal of Dr. Chakraborty’s research is to ensure that individuals have the resources and agency to enact their reproductive health choices and achieve sexual and reproductive wellbeing. As such, her research is highly interdisciplinary, involving collaborations across public health, sociology, medicine, law, computer science, and other disciplines.
