Nathan Levitt

Nathan Levitt, FNP, MSN, RN, BSN, MA is the recipient of the NEF Laura D. Smith National Student Nurses’ Association Scholarship. Nathan is currently in a nursing PhD program with a focus on health equity at Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing. Prior to his doctorate program, Nathan completed his Master of Science in nursing as a Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) at SUNY Downstate and his Bachelor of Science in nursing at New York University (NYU).

Nathan is the Director of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) and Gender Justice Learning at Yale University School of Nursing.  In this role, he teaches in a Gender and Sexuality Health Justice (GSHJ) concentration for MSN students. GSHJ consists of coursework about the health disparities of LGBTQ+ patients through a racial and economic justice lens. In addition to didactic courses, he runs a clinical course which pairs students with Nurse Practitioner experts in LGBTQ+ and health equity care throughout health centers around the country.

Nathan has been teaching LGBTQ healthcare, health and racial equity, and intersectionality to nursing and medical schools around the country for over 20 years.  Nathan’s clinical practice included working as a clinician at FOLX Health, a digital healthcare service provider providing customized medical plans for the LGBTQ community.  He has worked as a Nurse Practitioner in the gender affirming surgery program at NYU Langone Health where he provided education, preoperative, and postoperative care for transgender patients seeking gender affirmation surgery, as well as providing hormone therapy.  Nathan was in the first New York State Family Nurse Practitioner Fellowship program and became the Director of Transgender Care at Community Healthcare Network (CHN). He has worked as a transgender health consultant to NY State and NY City Departments of Health. He worked for 8 years at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center providing care for LGBTQ patients, building transgender health programs, and creating and facilitating curriculum on transgender health. Nathan trains individuals in community health centers, health professional schools, hospitals, and community-based organizations, and has been published widely, on transgender health. His long-term goals in nursing research are to integrate the history of feminist and LGBTQ movements, racial and social justice, and reproductive justice to develop a health equity inclusive evidence-based theoretical model. Nathan’s research aims to advance health equity by implementing nurse driven evidence based transgender healthcare to achieve lasting outcomes for transgender communities, and by developing an accessible body of transgender healthcare theory for nursing practice, research, and scholarship.

Specifically, his professional goal is to create health equity for all transgender patients by shaping a workforce of competent, knowledgeable, and compassionate nurses. He is focusing on the implementation of trauma informed nursing practice in gender affirming health care.

Nathan is grateful for the NEF/Laura D. Smith NSNA Scholarship. It provides financial support and confidence in his scholastic abilities that will help hasten his leadership development towards his goals of growing and maturing as a nurse researcher, disseminating findings to the nursing profession, and influencing institutional practices and protocols.