Marco Hidalgo, PhD

Dr. Marco Hidalgo (pronouns: he/they) is a clinician investigator whose behavioral research has contributed to national public health efforts at reducing HIV incidence among sexual and gender minorities, including people of color. Since 2013, he has been at the forefront of researching and developing gender-affirming practices tailored to transgender/gender-diverse individuals within mental health and multidisciplinary medical care settings. He has served on several national committees focused on LGBTQ+ health.

Born and raised in Southern California, Dr. Hidalgo completed doctoral training in clinical psychology at DePaul University and a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Hidalgo’s NIH-sponsored research centers around health and developmental outcomes of LGBTQ+ individuals, including people of color. Dr. Hidalgo also provides clinical care in the Gender Health Program at UCLA, where he helps transgender/gender-diverse children, adolescents and adult patients meet their mental health goals.

In 2013, while early-career faculty at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, he co-established the Gender and Sex Development Program at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. After 17 years away, he relocated back to Southern California in 2017 and was faculty in the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles/University of Southern California before joining the UCLA Department of Medicine in 2021. Dr. Hidalgo is passionate about enhancing EDI in academic medicine, and he has sought opportunities to be involved in these initiatives since graduate school. Most recently, he co-led efforts to address racial inequities in research and programming at his former institution. He also developed and delivered trainings on implicit bias to training directors and first-year fellows across pediatric subspecialties.