Our team is committed to finding ways to improve maternal and infant health outcomes and equity by leading research that identifies effective leverage points for change, from upstream 'macro' social and structural factors, to downstream 'micro' clinical factors through a collaborative research approach that integrates epidemiologic approaches with community engagement and systems thinking.
Disparities are prominent in maternal and infant health, so a lot of our work is centered on equity. Focusing on highest-risk groups will improve health for everyone.
Much of our current research focuses on severe maternal morbidity (SMM), so that is what we highlight here. SMM encompasses adverse conditions that put pregnant people at risk of short and long-term consequences related to labor and delivery, including death. The Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Stanford was selected as one of ten NIH Maternal Health Research Centers of Excellence in the country for our work dedicated to reducing one of the leading causes of SMM, postpartum hemorrhage. The program, PRIHSM (PRomoting Improvement in Hemorrhage-related Severe Maternal morbidity), is led by co-PIs Dr. Yasser El-Sayed and Dr. Suzan Carmichael.
We also study other important perinatal outcomes, including stillbirth, preterm birth, structural congenital malformations and other maternal morbidities. We are interested in these outcomes individually, as well as in how they are connected to each other -- from a mechanistic standpoint (ie, do they share the same causes), and a lifecourse perspective (eg, how does an adverse newborn outcome affect the mom's postpartum health, and vice versa).
Dr. Carmichael's training is in perinatal and nutritional epidemiology. She deeply appreciates her multi-disciplinary colleagues who make this work more meaningful by bringing their own varied perspectives and lived experiences, and their expertise in clinical care, qualitative and mixed methods, community engagement, and state-of-the-art epidemiologic approaches and biostatistical methods.
Selected Ongoing Projects
“Severe Maternal Morbidity: An Investigation of Joint Impacts of Risk Factors and Cumulative Risks Across Successive Pregnancies”
Awarded by NINR with Co-Funding from the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health (R01 NR017020).
This project examines the association of maternal weight status and social disadvantage with risks of SMM and disparities in this outcome. This project focuses on births in California.
Co-Investigators:
- Alison El Ayadi, ScD, MPH (UCSF)
- Barbara Abrams, DrPH, RD (University of California, Berkeley)
- Rachel Berkowitz, DrPH, MPH (San Jose State University)
- Henry Lee, MD (Stanford University)
- Deirdre Lyell, MD (Stanford University)
- Audrey Lyndon, PhD, FAAN, RNC (New York University)
- Elliott Main, MD (Stanford University)
- Mahasin Mujahid, PhD, MS, FAHA (University of California, Berkeley)
- Jonathan Snowden, PhD (Oregon Health & Science University)
- Lu Tian, Sc.D (Stanford University)