Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG

Dr. Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG (she/her), proudly stands as the Chief Black Feminist Physician Scientist, Founding CEO, and Owner of Birthing Cultural Rigor, LLC, with over 30 years of supporting women, girls, and gender-expansive people across the sexual, reproductive, and perinatal life course. Her work interrogates and transforms quality and patient safety paradigms through application of participatory multilevel quantitative, multilevel qualitative, and mixed methods and methodologies that simultaneously operationalize Black feminism, reproductive justice, and research justice at the intersection of cultural humility and scientific rigor, also known as cultural rigor. During the 2022 Black Maternal Health Conference and Training Institute, the Black Mamas Matter Alliance recognized Dr. Scott as an unsung hero in public health related to infant and maternal mortality prevention by selecting her to receive the Inaugural Jackson, Rowley, and Hogan Excellence in Black Maternal Health Scholarship, in honor of the foremothers of Black Maternal Health scholarship and practice. Dr. Scott and her team developed the first validated Patient Reported Experience Measure of obstetric racism© (the PREM-OB Scale® Suite) for prevention of and mitigation against obstetric racism during childbirth hospitalization in the afterlife of slavery. Dr. Scott is also the author of SACKRED Birth: Mobilizing A New Quality Paradigm in Obstetric Care, a vital call for prioritizing Black mothers’ expectations and experiences in clinical practice, decision making, and care delivery using new quality norms and methodologies to amplify the humanity and power, not pathology, of Black reproducing bodies and Black births. Currently, she serves on the Institutional Review Board Committee for Interfaith Voices for Reproductive Justice and the Board of Directors for the Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation. Dr. Scott is also an affiliated investigator with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health.