Dr. Brittany Chambers was born in raised in Oakland, California. She attended McClymonds High School in West Oakland, California (Go Warriors!). Dr. Chambers is a first-generation college student and attended undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley and majored in Anthropology and minored in Gender and Women’s Studies. She has traveled across California and the nation to complete her graduate studies receiving her MPH in Health Promotion from Fresno State and PhD in Community Health Education from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Dr. Chambers is a community health scientist dedicated to advancing sexual and reproductive health equity among Black, Indigenous, and Other People Of Color’s (BIPOC). She merges critical and public health theories to partner with BIPOC women and birthing people and organizations to better understand, operationalize and dismantle racism.

To better understand racism, funded by California Preterm Birth Initiative, Dr. Chambers and Dr. Anu Gómez at UC Berkeley, are taking a cell-to-society approach to understand how racism gets underneath the skin to contribute to preterm birth experienced by Black and Latina/x women in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Supporting Our Ladies and Reducing Stress to prevent preterm birth (SOLARS) study was designed to evaluate the relationship among psychological stressors, molecular risk factors, and gestational age in Black and Latina/ women residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. We were able to enroll 112 Black and Latina/x women and their babies collecting survey and biospecimen data across the pregnancy and postpartum periods. 

To better operationalize racism, Dr. Chambers is partnering with Black women and birthing people to reconceptualize racism, to identify novel ways to measure structural racism. She led a project using a community-based participatory approach in Oakland and Fresno to #listentoblackwomen across the reproductive lifespan define structural racism and describe how it shows up in their communities. The conceptual framework that emerged from this work guides Dr. Chambers current research agenda.

To better dismantle racism, funded by a National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities K01 grant, Dr. Chambers is developing and piloting testing a racial equity training for perinatal care providers. As an assistant professor at the UCSF, she received a competitive two-year UCSF-Kaiser Permanente Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health (BIRCWH) K12 award to collect formative data to develop the training. She continues to work with mentors at UCSF and Dr. Leigh Ann Simmons to move forward this important work that is a direct response to California Senate Bill 464.

Dr. Chambers is committed to taking a reproductive justice approach centering in on BIPOC women and birthing people at every phase of the research process.