Justice Informed Research Evaluation

Monica R. McLemore  PhD, MPH, RN

At the University of California, San Francisco, Monica McLemore is a tenured associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department, an affiliated scientist with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, and a member of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. She retired from clinical practice as a public health and staff nurse after a 28-year clinical nursing career in 2019, however, continues to provide flu and COVID-19 vaccines. Her program of research is focused on understanding reproductive health and justice. To date, she has 85 peer reviewed articles, OpEds and commentaries and her research has been cited in the Huffington Post, Lavender Health, five amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States, and three National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine reports, and a data visualization project entitled How To Fix Maternal Mortality: The first step is to stop blaming women that was published in the 2019 Future of Medicine edition of Scientific American. Her work has appeared in publications such as Dame Magazine, Politico, ProPublica/NPR and she made a voice appearance in Terrance Nance’s HBO series Random Acts of Flyness. She is the recipient of numerous awards and currently serves as chair for Sexual and Reproductive Health section of the American Public Health Association. She was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2019 and was named the Thelma Shobe Endowed Chair in 2021.

Brittany D Chambers PhD, MPH

Dr. Brittany Chambers is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Ecology Department at UC Davis and an affiliated faculty in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF. Dr. Chambers obtained her MPH in Health Promotion from Fresno State University and a PhD in Community Health Education from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her work focuses on understanding sexual and reproductive health inequities through examining the impact of individual and structural discrimination across multiple life domains. As a fellow with the California Preterm Birth Initiative, she worked with the Saving Our Ladies from Early Births and Reducing Stress (SOLARS) study team to examine mediating relationships between interpersonal racism and adverse birth outcomes experienced by Black women in Oakland. Dr. Chambers now serves as PI of the SOLARS Study. For her fellowship project, Dr. Chambers conducted a qualitative study to develop novel measures of structural racism from the perspective of Black and Latina women residing in Oakland and Fresno, California. Dr. Chambers was a UCSF-Kaiser Building Interdisciplinary Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) Program (K12) scholar. As a BIRCWH schoalr she launched the Community Racial Equity and Training Evaluation of Current and Future Health Care Providers (CREATE) Study developing a training centered on Black women's perspectives and provider input to address racism and implicit biases within perinatal care settings. 

Karen Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG

Dr. Scott is the Chief Black Feminist Physician Scientist, Founding CEO and Owner of Birthing Cultural Rigor, LLC, with more than 20 years of experience supporting women, girls, and persons across the sexual and reproductive life course in urban and suburban communities across the Midwest and California. She is an improvement and implementation scientist and activist grounded in a Black feminist-reproductive justice praxis with formal training and experience as community-based OBGYN and applied epidemiologist. Dr. Scott’s ethical, theoretical, and methodological approaches interrogate health services design, provision, evaluation, and training in antepartum, intrapartum, and postpartum units as sites through which obstetric racism is enacted and imposed upon the humanity, bodies, and lives of Black women, mothers, and people, in the afterlife of slavery and passage of the Congressional Act of 1807 (which took effect in 1808, prohibiting further participation of the United States in the slave trade.). She is also the developer and owner of the first and only validated Patient  Reported Experience Measure of Obstetric racism©, known as the PREM-OB Scale© (pronounced Oh-Bee) Suite, and principal investigator of the SACRED Birth study. Dr. Scott also developed the Virtual Perinatal QualityImprovement Prioritization by Affected Communities  (V-QPAC) Protocol, a Black feminist ethnographic methodology to  facilitate community participation in prioritizing untested socio-cultural perinatal QI recommendations across the domains in the PREM-OB ScaleTM in order to mitigate obstetric racism during hospital labor, birth, and postpartum.