Robert Garofalo MD, MPH

Robert Garofalo MD, MPH is a Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. He is the Chief of the Division of Adolescent & Young Adult Medicine at Lurie Children's Hospital. He founded and now co-directs the Lurie Children’s Gender and Sexual Development Program. Dr. Garofalo received a B.S. from Duke University (1988), his M.D. from New York University School of Medicine (1992), and an M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health. 

Dr. Garofalo has >25 years of clinical and research experience in global health, HIV, HIV prevention, and sexual and gender minority health. In 2010, he was appointed to the National Academy of Science/Institute of Medicine Committee on LGBT Health Issues and Research Gaps and Opportunities. In 2019 he was awarded the Ellen Perrin Lifetime Achievement Award in LGBTQ Health by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Dr. Garofalo’s research has been generously funded by both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the National Institutes of Health (NICHD, NIDA, NINR, NIAID, NIMH, NIDA, NIMHD) being the Principal Investigator on 20 research grants and a Co-Investigator on >30 other funded research projects. He is a member of several professional organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Society for Adolescent Medicine, the American Medical Association, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. 

Dr. Garofalo is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Transgender Health. In 2021 he co-authored the book, When Dogs Heal: Powerful Stories of People Living With HIV and the Dogs That Saved Them (Lerner Publishers). He has >200 publications in scholarly journals. In addition to academic work, Dr. Garofalo founded Fred Says (named after his dog), a 501c3 non-profit charity that has donated back to the community over $1 million to support organizations that provide care and services for transgender youth and young people impacted by HIV in the U.S. and around the world.