Gabriel R Murchison, PhD, MPH

Gabe Murchison is a social epidemiologist addressing behavioral health inequities between lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/nonbinary, and queer (LGBTQ) young people and their non-LGBTQ peers, focusing on substance use and co-occurring depression and anxiety. His research centers close peer relationships, including romantic relationships, as an under-explored influence on LGBTQ adolescents’ and young adults’ behavioral health. In his quantitative work, he uses epidemiologic approaches to causal inference to identify individual- and population-level mechanisms by which marginalization leads to adverse behavioral health outcomes. She also uses qualitative methods to explore how LGBTQ young people navigate and resist marginalization, setting the stage for interventions that leverage their existing strengths and supports.

Dr. Murchison is Principal Investigator of the Whole Selves Project, a five-year research project that will characterize how transgender/nonbinary young adults’ romantic relationships shape their alcohol use, depression, and anxiety in the context of social and structural marginalization, then translate these findings into a scalable, community-informed intervention that will help transgender/nonbinary young adults reflect on their alcohol use and romantic relationship decisions. This research is funded by a K99/R00 award from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Dr. Murchison was previously a T32 Postdoctoral Fellow with the Yale AIDS Prevention Training Program (2021-23). She completed her PhD at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2017-2021), where her research focused on the mechanisms underlying interpersonal violence disparities between LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ young people, drawing attention to the roles of school policies, peer and family relationships, and economic disenfranchisement. Prior to his doctoral training, he was Senior Research Manager at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation in Washington, DC (2015-2017), focusing primarily on LGBTQ youth wellbeing and transgender/nonbinary inclusion.