Emma Clark (she/her) is currently the director of nursing research at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital and an associate professor of nursing at the Georgetown Berkley School of Nursing, where she studies workforce interventions to reduce disparities in access to high-quality perinatal health care. She is a practicing certified nurse-midwife and provides full-scope care at a federally-qualified health center in Washington, DC. Prior to moving into academia, she worked in global maternal health and midwifery workforce development, including as a Senior Maternal Health Adviser at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). She is a graduate of Frontier Nursing University and received her PhD from Vanderbilt University in 2024 with a dissertation on the relationship between midwifery regulation and maternal health outcomes in 100 countries worldwide. Dr. Clark currently co-chairs the DC American College of Nurse-Midwives affiliate and is on the Accreditation Committee for Midwifery Education Board of Commissioners. She has held multiple global leadership positions including serving on the board of the global Partnership for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health and as chair of the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition’s Maternal Health Supplies Caucus.
Project: Kujenga Pamoja (Building Together): An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Sustainable Perinatal Mental Health in Zanzibar
Perinatal mental health disorders affect roughly one in ten pregnant people in Tanzania, yet Zanzibar has few clinicians trained to screen or treat them, and most health facilities lack the tools and private space needed for care. Even where services exist, deep stigma keeps many women from seeking help. Because midwives — who are almost entirely women — deliver the bulk of perinatal care in Zanzibar, the challenge is inseparable from broader gender dynamics: how women voice distress, how power operates between patient and provider, and how local ways of understanding suffering intersect with Western psychiatric models. This project extends an existing Georgetown Global Engagement grant with WAJAMAMA Community Health and the State University of Zanzibar, which is building perinatal mental health screening and referral capacity among clinicians and midwifery educators. The added research component asks two questions: how traditional gender roles and household power structures shape women’s ability to voice mental health concerns and follow through on referrals, and how a bi-directional training model can validate midwives’ own gendered knowledge alongside biomedical frameworks. Using feminist participatory action research, the study centers Zanzibari midwives, educators, and community leaders as co-creators of knowledge rather than passive recipients of training. During a four-day immersive workshop, four focus group discussions will use narrative prompts to surface the structural and cultural barriers shaping perinatal experience. The approach treats midwives themselves as an intersectional group — professionally authoritative yet subject to many of the same patriarchal, religious, and economic pressures as their patients — and asks what changes when their expertise, not just Western frameworks, drives the model of care. Findings will inform a policy white paper for the Zanzibar Ministry of Health, a peer-reviewed manuscript, conference presentations, and future NIH Fogarty and Grand Challenges Canada applications.