Dr. Monica McLemore Selected as Interim Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

We are pleased to announce that Monica R. McLemore PhD, MPH, RN, has been selected as our school’s Interim Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Dr. Monica R. McLemore is a tenured professor in the Child, Family, and Population Health Department and the Interim Director for the Manning Price Spratlen Center for Anti-Racism in Nursing and Equity at the University of Washington School of Nursing and adjunct professor in the Health Systems and Population Health Department in the School of Public Health.

The interim appointment is effective 07/01/23 and contingent on UW Board of Regents approval.

Dr. Monica McLemore

Dr. McLemore is a preeminent scholar of Anti-Racist birth equity research, community-informed methods, and policy translation. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Nursing from The College of New Jersey in 1993 after declaring at eight years old I would become a nurse. She earned a master’s in public health from San Francisco State University and a PhD in oncology genomics at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. McLemore has worked her entire career in reproductive health, rights, and justice.

Dr. McLemore’s research findings have been widely cited and her writings work synergistically to allow her thoughts, ideas, and strategies to design and test interventions to advance reproductive justice for all. Her program of research is focused on understanding reproductive health and justice. To date, she has 93 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 also 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. Dr. McLemore is the recipient of numerous awards and currently serves and she was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2019. She became the Editor in Chief of Health Equity Journal in 2022.

We very excited to work with Dr. McLemore to advance DEI in everything we do throughout our school. Let’s congratulate and welcome her.