Roseline Jean Louis was born in Haiti and is in her third year 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 current 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 Birth Equity Research Fellow at the National Birth Equity Collaborative (NBEC). 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 was asked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Maternal Mortality Prevention Division of Reproductive Health to lead a data analysis of the Maternal Mortality Review Information Application (MMRIA) data set from 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 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, and research support representative for Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing Divisional Community and Diversity Committee. 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. Ms. Jean Louis actively seeks post-doctoral fellowship opportunities and plans to pursue a tenure-track faculty career in a research-intensive university.