Roseline Jean Louis was born in Petit Goave, Haiti, and a Ph.D. Candidate at Emory University School of Nursing. As a first-generation Haitian immigrant, she is one of the first in her family to graduate from college and will be the first to obtain a graduate degree. As a labor and delivery nurse who’s worked in multiple hospitals across the southeastern united states, Ms. Jean Louis has first-hand experience with the inequities that people of color face while seeking maternal healthcare. More specifically, she believes that these inequities are rooted in racism and pervasive discrimination within healthcare systems. Her research focuses on investigating modifiable risk factors to prevent adverse maternal health inequities that plague the Black community in the United States. Her dissertation uses a multi-methods approach to; 1) quantitatively examine the impacts of racial discrimination and disrespectful maternity care on severe maternal morbidity among Black women in the United States, and 2) qualitatively explore the lived experiences of women who experienced high rates of racial discrimination and disrespectful care. She has co-authored three peer-reviewed manuscripts and has three first-authored manuscripts pending publication.

Ms. Jean Louis is a current Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society Scholar and Birth Equity Research Fellow at the National Birth Equity Collaborative (NBEC) where she provides research and evaluation support for NBEC’s programmatic teams and informs organizational research and evaluation practices that center Black women and decolonized research methodologies. As part of the NBEC fellowship, she leads a data analysis of the Maternal Mortality Review Information Application (MMRIA) data set from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Maternal Mortality Prevention Division of Reproductive Health looking at the impacts of racism on maternal mortality. This work will be submitted as a first author publication by me in the next year and will further elucidate the relationship between racism, respectful care, and maternal morbidity outcomes among Black women. At Emory University, she currently serves in a variety of organizations and committees including, serving as former president of the Emory University Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing Ph.D. Nursing Student Association, Black student representative for Emory University’s Laney Graduate School Student Council, research support representative for Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing Divisional Community and Diversity Committee, and serves as clinical faculty in the School of Nursing.

Outside of the academic setting Ms. Jean louis is assisting the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) in developing tools and resources to support state maternal mortality review committees in adopting a consistent approach to determining if discrimination, structural racism, and/or interpersonal racism contributed to a pregnancy-related death. Finally, she currently serves as co-chair of the health committee for the North Fulton National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which strives to ensure the educational, political, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and discrimination.

Ms. Jean Louis’ long-term career goal is to be an independent nurse researcher and a leader in research on maternal health disparities among marginalized populations. She aims to develop and implement potential strategies to improve maternal health among these populations.

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