Charlotte Lapsansky

Charlotte Lapsansky is the managing director of the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit, where she leads team operations, helps shape the strategic direction of its project portfolio, and supports the implementation and scale-up of behavioral interventions across health care settings. Charlotte is also an adjunct faculty member in the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Public Health program, where she teaches Designing Health Communication Interventions, and a senior fellow at Penn’s Center for Public Health.

Charlotte has more than two decades of experience applying behavioral and social science to understand what drives health behavior and to design, test, and implement interventions. Her work has included leading multidisciplinary teams and applied research portfolios addressing public health challenges around the world. Before joining the Nudge Unit, she worked at Save the Children, where she served as director of social & behavior change for a $25 million USAID-funded applied research initiative spanning more than 10 countries. Previously, at UNICEF headquarters, she managed applied behavioral research projects and led global efforts to help public health organizations and practitioners use behavioral and social science and design thinking to develop more effective programs.

Charlotte’s interest in understanding behavior began at Brown University, where she earned a BA in biology with an interdisciplinary focus on the study of behavior. She went on to earn a PhD in communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where she specialized in health communication and health behavior change.