GOLD Speakers

Tanya Khemet Taiwo, PhD, MPH, CPM

• Country: USA

Biography:

Dr. Tanya Khemet Taiwo is an assistant professor in the Department of Midwifery at Bastyr University. She also provides midwifery care on a part-time basis at CommuniCare Health Centers, a Federally Qualified Health Center with clinics in urban and rural communities around the Sacramento area. Dr. Taiwo is an epidemiologist whose research examines the role of maternal prenatal stress on child neurodevelopment, and how these stressors interact with environmental exposures. She serves as co-director of the Community Engagement Core at the UC Davis Environmental Health Sciences Center. She is also a research fellow at The Birth Place Lab at the University of British Columbia. At the Birth Place Lab she’s collaborating on the Giving Voice to Mothers Study, a community based participatory research project that examines how race, ethnicity and birthplace affect maternity care in the United States. Tanya comes from a family tradition of midwives, stretching back at least three generations, she received her midwifery training at Seattle Midwifery School, and apprenticed with midwives in Seattle, Senegal and Jamaica. She is committed to the revitalization of the tradition of midwifery within the African American community, and the eradication of the ethnic disparities in perinatal health outcomes.