​Charisa Gillette, MD, MPH

​Cooper Medical School of Rowan University. Charisa grew up in San Diego, California. She received a biology degree with a music minor at Point Loma Nazarene University. Before attending medical school, she worked as a substitute teacher and as a research fellow at the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research, where she worked on the Northern White Rhino team. She moved to the Philadelphia area to attend medical school. While there, she served as a Street Medicine student leader, going on weekend outreaches to local encampments to offer care and friendship to the local unhoused community. She also served as a health coach for underinsured prenatal 

​patients. To learn more about the systemic inequities faced by her patients, Charisa took time from medical school to pursue an MPH with a concentration in Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health at UC Berkeley. She focused on the harms caused by the American medical system, particularly to women of color and their families. Her capstone research was on the history of eugenics and sterilization coercion in American gynecology.

​Charisa is particularly passionate about reproductive care. As a family medicine physician, she wants to embody the expansive values of reproductive justice as defined by its ideologic creators at Sister Song. These tenets include the right of every person to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children they have in safe and sustainable communities.

Charisa loves yarn, music, and building healthy friendships. You can find her at a bookstore looking for the latest children’s book on body-positive sex education or at a plant shop looking to replace the latest plant destroyed by her dog or daughter.