LaShawn Glasgow

LaShawn Glasgow is a researcher with more than 20 years of experience in the public health field. Dr. Glasgow currently directs RTI’s Center for Program & Policy Evaluation to Advance Community Health. She leads projects designed to optimize the implementation and impact of evidence-based interventions for preventing and managing chronic diseases and conditions.

Her recent work has helped elucidate how local partnerships can help advance community changes that promote healthy living, such as building new playgrounds and walking trails, creating new school and community gardens, and adopting tobacco-free policies.

Dr. Glasgow is also one of the multiple principal investigators of the Data Coordination Center for the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) HEALing Communities Study. As part of the HEALing Communities Study (HCS), researchers collaborated with 67 rural and urban communities across 4 states to implement over 1,000 evidence-based strategies for reducing opioid overdose deaths. Strategies implemented in HCS communities focused on increasing overdose education and naloxone distribution, expanding access to medication treatment for opioid use disorder, and promoting safer opioid prescribing.

Before joining RTI in 2008, Dr. Glasgow was a public health prevention specialist for the CDC and the Pennsylvania Department of Health where she provided planning and evaluation capacity building support for evidence-based cancer, cardiovascular health, diabetes, and obesity interventions. Her early career experience also includes community health work, connecting families exposed to traumatic life events to behavioral health and social support services.