Kylea Laina Liese, PhD, CNM

I am a medical anthropologist and certified nurse midwife who engages a reproductive justice framework to contextualize and address the social drivers and repercussions of sexual and reproductive health disparities. I use mixed methods to examine causal pathways and unforeseen consequences that link reproduction and health disparities in communities with intersecting identities of oppression. I conceptualize my global and domestic research programs as part of broader efforts to anchor reproductive trends in maternal mortality and morbidity in bio-social and socio-medical realms.

My current research focuses on the health system structures that drive disparities in equitable access to sexual and reproductive health. With funding from the PCORI foundation and in partnership with Chicago Birthworks Collective, this project assess the implementation and impact of a culturally-adapted and patient-centered model of maternity care inclusive of broad structural changes to attenuate the impacts of structural racism. Melanated Group Midwifery Care (MGMC) was designed with our community partners to center the voices of Black women and adopt the Illinois Maternal Mortality Review Committee’s(MMRC) recommendations for preventing maternal death. MGMC merges four evidence-based interventions: 1)Racial concordance between patients and providers; 2) Group prenatal care; 3) Maternal care coordination; and 4) In-home, postpartum doula support.

To address inconsistent abortion training and barriers to practice integration, I established the Reproductive Advocacy and Diversity in Advanced Nursing Training (RADIANT) Fellowship with funding from the Illinois Department of Public Health. The RADIANT Fellowship expands abortion access through three aims: 1)  Establishing midwife-led abortion clinics and advanced practice clinician (APC) clinical training sites; 2) Providing trauma informed and patient centered abortion training and mentorship to licensed providers across the state of Illinois; 3) Standardizing abortion education and training across graduate curriculum for advanced practice clinicians.

My global work focuses on how social, political and historical processes shape reproductive health experiences and outcomes across geo-political borders. In Central Asia (Tajikistan/Afghanistan), I am interested in how political instability (e.g., fall of the USSR, decades of civil wars) reverberates to peripheral regions and impacts the everyday lives of families. Between 2005-2008, I conducted surveys of maternal mortality and comparative ethnography to understand women's experiences in two villages across a narrow geo-political border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan in the Badakhshan region.

I completed my BA at Emory University and my MA and PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University. My early research in global maternal health drove me to also pursue my MSN at Yale University and become certified as a nurse-midwife. My midwifery practice informs and grounds my academic research. Currently, I provide abortion are and attend births in both the hospital and community settings in Chicago.