Gianna Dantoumda (she/her) is a senior at Georgetown University studying Neurobiology and Psychology. Her research interests focus on maternal and child health, reproductive health, and health equity, particularly how social and structural factors contribute to disparities in health outcomes and access to care. She is especially interested in understanding inequities in maternal and perinatal healthcare and exploring how research can help inform more equitable systems of care for women, children, and underserved communities.
Project: Understanding Community-Led Approaches to Maternal and Child Health Across West Africa and the United States
Maternal and child health outcomes are shaped as much by community structures and trust as by clinical care itself. This project is broadly interested in how community-led initiatives support maternal and child health across West African countries, and what those approaches might have in common with, or offer to, similar efforts in the United States. Rather than treating communities as passive recipients of health guidance, this project centers the perspectives of families and community members themselves, examining what they identify as helpful, difficult, or missing in the support they receive around pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood care. The plan is to engage with qualitative data, primarily through interviews and program evaluation work, to better understand recurring patterns in how families experience and navigate health support within their communities. A central aim is to think comparatively: to consider whether questions of trust, access, and communal responsibility for health look similar or different across West African and U.S. contexts, and what that might reveal about what makes community-led health initiatives effective more broadly. This is not intended as generalizable clinical research, but as an effort to draw practical, grounded insight from the people and programs directly involved.