Faith Crittenden, MD, MPH
Faith Crittenden, MD, MPH
Resident Physician
Yale New Haven Hospital
Faith Danielle Crittenden, MD MPH is a resident physician in Pediatrics at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut.
Her steadfast passion towards equity in medicine shines through her leadership positions, advocacy, and activism. As a first-generation, low-income background physician, Dr. Crittenden uses her experiences to advocate for more diversity in medicine and to address the well-known disparities. Since 2016, she has been active within organized medicine, to open doors for others and create tangible policies that can impact medicine in the present. She currently is the Public Health Committee Chair of the AMA Resident and Fellows Section as well as AAP Liaison to the AMA Resident and Fellows Section. In these roles she spends her time advocating for minority voices, engaging in policy discussions, and focuses on centering policy viewpoints around equity.
In 2020, as co-liaison for the SNMA, Dr. Crittenden also co-authored AMA policies Racism is a Public Health Threat and Police Brutality, which garner national attention and recognition by the CDC. In 2021, she co-authored medicine’s first “CROWN ACT”, Combating Natural Hair and Cultural Headwear discrimination among Children and Adolescents adopted by the AAP. These policy adoptions open the door for national level conversations to center around how we can make medicine an anti-racist profession, with the goal to move beyond performative activism.
As a medical student, Dr. Crittenden spent her Saturdays mentoring in the same pipeline program she was once a part of as a high school student. As a beneficiary of the Health Career Opportunity pipeline program (HCOP), she has advocated nationally for continued funding of this program and renewal support of low-income students to have opportunities to enter medicine.
Her professional interests range from educating minority communities on diet, nutrition, and weight management from a cultural perspective, to implementing anti-racism strategies in clinical medicine to highlighting the first-generation experience through narrative medicine. So far, she has been able to promote these interests as co-deputy Editor of Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine’s Preventative Medicine issue, as a TEDx speaker, and as a part of the award-winning short film documentary, The Disparity.
Her efforts have been acknowledged across the field as she has been the recipient of several local, state, and national awards, including the University of Connecticut’s Health Career Opportunity Program (HCOP) Mentoring Award (2021), Connecticut Children’s Service & Advocacy Award (2021), University of Connecticut School of Medicine- Urban Service Track Scholar (2015), University of Connecticut John and Valerie Rowe Scholar Program (2012) and Bill and Melinda Gates Millennium Scholar (2010), among others.
Dr. Faith Danielle Crittenden is a local of Windsor, Connecticut, and a proud Black New Englander where she earned her BS in Chemistry, minor in Molecular and Cell Biology with Honors from the University of Connecticut, MPH in Health Policy at Yale School of Public Health and MD from University of Connecticut School of Medicine.