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Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice (2020)

Chapter: Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
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Appendix

Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff

SUSAN C. SCRIMSHAW (Chair) recently retired as president of The Sage Colleges. Previously, she was president of Simmons College and, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she served as dean of the School of Public Health and professor of community health sciences and of anthropology. Her research includes community participatory research methods, addressing health disparities, improving pregnancy outcomes, violence prevention, health literacy, and culturally appropriate delivery of health care. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the Institute of Medicine of Chicago. She is a past president of the board of directors of the U.S.-Mexico Foundation for Science, former chair of the Association of Schools of Public Health, and past president of the Society for Medical Anthropology. Her honors and awards include the Margaret Mead Award, a Hero of Public Health gold medal awarded by President Vicente Fox of Mexico, the Adam Yarmolinsky Medal awarded by the National Academy of Medicine, the Chicago Community Clinic Visionary Award, and the Career Achievement Award of the Society for Medical Anthropology. She has an M.A. and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University.

JILL ALLIMAN is a member on the faculty of Frontier Nursing University, where she teaches master’s and doctoral nursing students. She is also program director of the Strong Start project of the American Association of Birth Centers (AABC), which collects data in 45 birth centers on the impact of enhanced prenatal care. Previously, as a birth center midwife in rural

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×

Appalachia, she worked to improve access to care for some of the most underserved women in the United States. She is past president of AABC and currently serves as chair of its Government Affairs Committee, where she assisted with a successful effort to add birth center facility coverage to Medicaid covered services. Her current focus is on extending the birth center model of care to a wider group of women. She has a doctorate in nursing practice from Frontier Nursing University with a concentration in nursing practice.

EMILY P. BACKES (Study Director) is a program officer with the Board on Children, Youth, and Families (BCYF) in the Division of Behavioral, Social Sciences, and Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She previously served as director for BCYF studies on adolescence and the financing of early care and education and provided analytical and editorial support to other projects covering a wide range of topics, including juvenile justice, policing and illicit markets, education and literacy, science communication, and human rights. She has a B.A. and an M.A. in history from the University of Missouri, specializing in U.S. human rights policy, and a J.D. from the University of the District of Columbia, where she represented clients as a student attorney with the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic and the Juvenile and Special Education Law Clinic.

MELISSA CHEYNEY is associate professor of clinical medical anthropology at Oregon State University (OSU) with additional appointments in global health and in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. She is also a licensed midwife in active practice. Dr. Cheyney directs the International Reproductive Health Laboratory at OSU, where she serves as the Primary Investigator on more than 20 maternal and infant health-related research projects, including the Community Doula Project. She is the author of an ethnography, Born at Home, along with dozens of peer-reviewed articles that examine the cultural beliefs and clinical outcomes associated with midwife-led births at home and in birth centers in the United States. She is the mother of a daughter born at home on International Day of the Midwife in 2009. She has a Ph.D. in medical anthropology from the University of Oregon.

MICHELLE R. COLLINS is a professor and associate dean of academic affairs at Rush University College of Nursing. She has a widely diverse clinical practice that includes initiating a successful waterbirth service at that site in Marion, Illinois, where she was the first certified nurse-midwife. She is active in the Vanderbilt nurse-midwifery practice, having a special interest in cervical dysplasia diagnosis and treatment. She has received awards for teaching and expertise in working with the media. Her work focuses not only on clinical practice, but also on teaching the next generation of certi-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×

fied nurse-midwives, with the goal of helping students develop their passion in caring for women through every stage of their lives. She has published in a variety of journals, such as the Journal for Nurse Practitioners, Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health, Reviews in Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Nursing for Women’s Health. She is a fellow of the American College of Nurse-Midwives and the American Academy of Nursing. She has an M.S. in nursing from Marquette University and a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.

BROWNSYNE TUCKER EDMONDS is an obstetrician-gynecologist and health services researcher at the Indiana University School of Medicine, where she is also an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology and serves as an assistant dean for faculty affairs, professional development, and diversity. Her work focuses on disparities, shared decision making, and periviable care, with the goals of eliminating health disparities, advancing social justice, and promoting professionalism and humanism in the care of underserved populations. In the Office of Diversity Affairs, she focuses on faculty development for populations underrepresented in medicine and developing programming to help junior faculty of color advance professionally in the Indiana University School of Medicine community. She was a Norman F. Grant/American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology fellow at the National Academy of Medicine. She has a B.A. from Brown University, an M.A. in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health, an M.A. in health policy research from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.D. from Brown University.

MARY GHITELMAN (Senior Program Assistant) is on the staff of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families and the Committee on Population in the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She has been with the Academies since April 2015, working on reports including The Integration of Immigrants into American Society; Valuing Climate Damages: Updating Estimation of the Social Cost of Carbon Dioxide; Transforming the Financing of Early Care and Education; and The Promise of Adolescence: Realizing Opportunity for All Youth. She received her B.A. in psychology from Beloit College and studied abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark, with a focus in cross-cultural psychology.

WENDY GORDON is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Midwifery at Bastyr University, and she has an active practice as a licensed midwife at the Center for Birth Midwives in Seattle. Her teaching and research interests include the provision of midwifery care in home and birth center settings; the role of racism in perinatal health disparities; and

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×

the ability to translate and evaluate research. She serves as the president of the board of directors of the Association of Midwifery Educators, is active in the Midwives Association of Washington State as a member of the Data Committee, and is also a member of the Practice Committee Workgroup for the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives. She has a B.S. in chemical engineering, an M.P.H. from Oregon Health & Sciences University with a focus in health disparities, and a doctorate in midwifery from Jefferson University.

ERIN HAMMERS FORSTAG is a science writer and public health lawyer. She has contributed to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reports on topics as varied as the Ebola epidemic, mitochondrial replacement techniques, and the financing of early childhood education. Her interests include the intersection between public health and the First Amendment, bioethics, and issues relating to women and children. Prior to her career in science writing, she worked in political advocacy and as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Uzbekistan. She holds an M.P.H. from Columbia University and her juris doctorate from Georgetown University.

ELIZABETH S. HOWE-HUIST (Associate Program Officer) is on the staff of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families in the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She has a B.A. in psychology from Wright State University, with additional training in marriage and family counseling, and an M.A. in sociology from the University of Mississippi. She is currently completing a Ph.D. in sociology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where she has engaged in demographic research on family processes and how these family relationships affect youth and young adults.

BRIDGET B. KELLY (Consultant) specializes in research and evaluation, policy analysis, strategy development, stakeholder engagement, and meeting design and facilitation. Previously, at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, she oversaw a portfolio of projects that included early childhood, mental health, chronic diseases, HIV, and evaluation science. More recently, she cofounded the nonprofit Bridging Health & Community, with the mission of helping the health sector work more effectively with communities. Trained in medicine and developmental neurobiology, she has a B.A. from Williams College and an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Duke University.

MARIAN FRANCES MACDORMAN is a research professor at the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also editor-in-chief of the journal Birth: Issues in Peri

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×

natal Care. Her research focuses on reproductive health issues, including maternal, fetal, infant and perinatal morbidity and mortality, preterm birth, out-of-hospital births, and cesarean deliveries. Previously, she was on the staff at the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, conducting research and producing national data sets on reproductive and child health issues. She has a Ph.D. in demography from Australian National University.

M. KATHRYN MENARD is distinguished professor and vice chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, where she also serves as director of the Center for Maternal Infant Health and director of the Division of Maternal Fetal Medicine. She also serves as medical director of the pregnancy medical home model through Community Care of North Carolina, a statewide program designed to enhance access to high-quality prenatal care and improve birth outcomes for pregnant women with Medicaid coverage. Her work is focused at the intersect between public health and the everyday challenges of clinical obstetric care. She recently served as president of the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine, and she currently serves on the executive committee for the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health and on the Patient Quality and Safety Committee of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She has an M.P.H. from the University of North Carolina and an M.D. from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and she completed her medical residency at the University of Pennsylvania.

KAREN MILGATE is a health care policy consultant whose specialty is Medicare and Medicaid policies, programs, operations, and data. Most recently, she was the deputy director of the Center for Strategic Planning in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she led strategic planning efforts, helped build analytical tools, coordinated interagency initiatives, and helped build the data infrastructure to enable CMS to better manage and direct its programs. Previously, she was a research director for the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and senior associate director for policy development for the American Hospital Association, and she served as the executive director for a nonprofit organization focused on education around women’s reproductive health. She has a B.A. in economics and a B.A. in international studies from American University and an M.A. in public policy from the University of Maryland.

JOCHEN PROFIT is the chief quality officer at the California Perinatal Quality Care Collaborative and an associate professor of pediatrics at

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×

Stanford University. He also practices as a neonatologist. Previously, he was an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine. His research concentrates on measuring and improving the quality of neonatal and pediatric health care delivery, with a focus on enhancing organizational effectiveness. He developed a composite indicator quality of care provided to very low-birthweight infants in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), which has been used to benchmark quality of care delivery in California’s NICUs. His research has also focused on organizational determinants of excellence, including patient safety culture, high reliability, and caregiver resilience. He has served as an advisor to a variety of national quality of care and safety organizations and is a standing scientific reviewer for the National Institutes of Health. He has a medical degree from the AlbertLudwigs-University in Freiburg, Germany, and he completed pediatric residency training at Tufts University.

CAROL SAKALA leads maternal health and maternity care programming at the National Partnership for Women & Families. She works as a maternity care advocate, educator, researcher, author, and policy analyst, with a continuous focus on meeting the needs and interests of childbearing women and their families. Previously, she served as director of programs at Childbirth Connection, which became a core program of the National Partnership for Women & Families in 2014. She has been an investigator on all national Listening to Mothers surveys and was principal investigator of the most recent Listening to Mothers in California survey. She has contributed to creating or commissioning foundational resources for the field on such topics as the cost of having a baby, maternity care and liability, evidence-based maternity care, effectiveness of labor support, hormonal physiology of childbearing, and performance of the nation’s maternity care system. She has an M.A. from the University of Chicago, an M.S. in public health from the University of Utah, and a Ph.D. in health policy from Boston University.

NEEL SHAH is an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Delivery Decisions Initiative at Ariadne Labs. He also holds appointments in health policy and management at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and in health law policy at Harvard Law School. In his academic work, he designs and tests health system innovations that aim to improve the well-being of mothers in the United States and globally. In collaboration with professional colleagues in obstetrics, midwifery, and nursing, he has published extensively on the design of maternal health systems in leading journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. He is also an obstetrician-gynecologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Earlier, he founded Costs of Care, a global nongovernmental

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×

organization that curates insights from clinicians to help delivery systems provide better care, and he cofounded the March for Moms Association, a coalition of 40 leading organizations, to increase public and private investment in the well-being of mothers. He has an M.D. from Brown Medical School.

DARA SHEFSKA (Associate Program Officer) is on the staff of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families (BCYF) in the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Previously, she provided research and analytic support to two BCYF reports, A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty and The Promise of Adolescence: Realizing Opportunity for All Youth. She also previously worked on the staff of the Food and Nutrition Board. She is a graduate of McGill University and is currently pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

KATHLEEN RICE SIMPSON is a perinatal clinical nurse specialist in St. Louis, Missouri. She is the editor-in-chief of MCN: The American Journal of Maternal/Child Nursing. As principal investigator, she has conducted research on such topics as fetal well-being during labor, uterine activity during labor, fetal monitoring, labor induction, and nurse staffing, among others. She was the principal investigator of the Michigan Hospital Association’s Keystone OB Patient Safety Project, and is currently serving as chair of the March of Dimes National Advisory Committee. She has been a member of the Joint Commission Perinatal Technical Advisory Panel, the National Quality Forum Steering Committee on National Voluntary Consensus Standards for the Perinatal Care, the National Priorities Partnership Maternity Action Team of the National Quality Forum, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Expert Panel for Electronic Fetal Heart Rate Monitoring. She also provides consultation to hospitals and health care systems to promote safe care for mothers and babies. She has a nursing degree from Loyola University Chicago and a Ph.D. in nursing from Saint Louis University.

LORI TREGO (Nurse Scholar in Residence) is a certified nurse midwife and associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver Anschutz Medical Campus College of Nursing, where she teaches in the veteran and military health care graduate program. Previously, she retired from service in the military as a U.S. Army Nurse Corps officer, where she provided leadership over a wide range of obstetric practices. She has extensive experience in inpatient and outpatient obstetrical/gynecological care as a registered nurse, as the director of obstetric and well woman clinics, and in full-scope midwifery practice. She has done extensive work on military

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×

women’s health and sex- and gender-specific health needs, and, more generally, improving the health of military women across the life course. Her current research investigates women’s perceptions of the care afforded to them by the Veterans Administration.

RUTH ENID ZAMBRANA is professor and interim chair in the Department of Women’s Studies and director of the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also an adjunct professor of family medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Medicine. Her work applies a critical intersectional lens to structural inequality and racial, Hispanic ethnicity, and gender inequities in population health and higher education trajectories. She has published extensively and serves on many social science and public health journal editorial boards. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Julian Samora Distinguished Career Award by the Latino/as Section of the American Sociological Association for her contributions to the sociology of Latinos and immigrant studies, teaching, and mentoring, and the 2013 American Public Health Association Latino Caucus Founding Member Award for Vision and Leadership. She has a B.A. from Queens College of the City University of New York, an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. from Boston University.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×
Page 346
Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×
Page 347
Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×
Page 348
Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×
Page 349
Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×
Page 350
Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×
Page 351
Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25636.
×
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The delivery of high quality and equitable care for both mothers and newborns is complex and requires efforts across many sectors. The United States spends more on childbirth than any other country in the world, yet outcomes are worse than other high-resource countries, and even worse for Black and Native American women. There are a variety of factors that influence childbirth, including social determinants such as income, educational levels, access to care, financing, transportation, structural racism and geographic variability in birth settings. It is important to reevaluate the United States' approach to maternal and newborn care through the lens of these factors across multiple disciplines.

Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice reviews and evaluates maternal and newborn care in the United States, the epidemiology of social and clinical risks in pregnancy and childbirth, birth settings research, and access to and choice of birth settings.

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