Dr. Charlene Flash is president and CEO of Avenue 360 Health and Wellness, a Federally Qualified Health Center providing primary, behavioral, and dental care to 14,000 patients in the Houston region. The health center provides a 360-degree approach to healthcare that integrates a patient’s in-clinic medical needs with their socio-economic realities outside of the exam room. In 2020, Avenue 360 helped provide stable housing to 530 people.
An infectious disease physician, Dr. Flash developed one of the first comprehensive HIV prevention programs pre-exposure prophylaxis in the United States. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Houston Chronicle and Houston Public Media. The Houston Business Journal awarded Dr. Flash as one of its outstanding leaders in health care last year. She also has received the trailblazer award from the Houston chapter of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women.
Dr. Flash maintains a voluntary clinical faculty appointment at Baylor College of Medicine as an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Disease and is an Associate Professor at the University of Houston College of Medicine. She is a graduate of Yale University and Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, where she received her master’s in public health. She completed an adult infectious disease fellowship at Harvard – Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
She has served in senior clinical or administrative positions at Harris Health System (Ben Taub Hospital), Thomas Street Health Center, and Legacy Community Health in Houston. She has been part of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s #AsktheHIVdoc series. A highly sought-after national expert on the implementation of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, Dr. Flash developed one of the first comprehensive HIV prevention programs in the United States to prescribe HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to high-risk communities in a real-world setting outside the context of a demonstration project or clinical trial.
Dr. Flash served as a reviewer for the CDC’s clinical guidelines: Preexposure Prophylaxis for the Prevention of HIV Infection in the United States. She has been a consultant to Emory University to expand PrEP use, to the Houston Department of Health and Human Services, and the Black AIDS Institute Houston Learning Collaborative. She has mentored infectious disease fellows, medical residents, public health and social work students.
President and CEO
Avenue 360 Health and Wellness
2150 West 18th St.
Houston, Texas 77008
(713) 426-0027
cflash@avenue360.org
www.avenue360.org
