Leadership

Dr. Monica R. McLemore (she/her/Dr.) is a tenured professor in the Child, Family, and Population Health Department at the University of Washington School of Nursing. Prior to her arrival at UW, she was a tenured associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco and was named the Thelma Shobe Endowed Chair in 2021. She retired from clinical practice as a public health and staff nurse after a 28-year clinical nursing career in 2019, however, continues to provide flu and COVID-19 vaccines.

Her program of research is focused on understanding reproductive health and justice. To date, she has 93 peer reviewed articles, OpEds and commentaries and her research has been cited in the Huffington Post, Lavender Health, five amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States, and three National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine reports, and a data visualization project entitled How To Fix Maternal Mortality: The first step is to stop blaming women that was published in the 2019 Future of Medicine edition of Scientific American.

Her work has also appeared in publications such as Dame Magazine, Politico, ProPublica/NPR and she made a voice appearance in Terrance Nance’s HBO series Random Acts of Flyness. She is the recipient of numerous awards and currently serves as chair for Sexual and Reproductive Health section of the American Public Health Association. She was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2019. She became the Editor in Chief of Health Equity Journal in 2022.

Dr. Daniel Suárez-Baquero (he/him/el) is from Colombia, where he obtained my MSN and BSN from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, focused on Maternal and Perinatal Nursing Care. Dr. Suárez Baquero has expertise as a labor and birth nurse, nurse midwife, and nurse administrator.

He obtained his Ph.D. in Nursing at The University of Texas at Austin, studying the essence of Colombian Partería Tradicional (lay midwifery). He worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the ACTIONS program at The University of California San Francisco focused on reproductive justice as the primary approach to reproductive health services provision.

Since undergraduate studies, he developed a deep passion for qualitative research methods, specially working on reproductive justice, Latine reproductive health experiences, and community/cultural memory of ethnic minoritized women. Dr. Suárez Baquero uses advanced qualitative methods to enhance the voices of minoritized communities that have been overlooked to promote health, birth equity, and reproductive justice globally.

Dr. Ellen Solis (she/her) is the track lead for the nurse-midwifery and women’s health clinical nurse specialist tracks of the DNP program and has been a practicing nurse-midwife for over 17 years.

Her experience as a professor and midwife has allowed her to center the voices and experiences of her clients, students, and colleagues—especially those from BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities—while working towards amplifying their presence in healthcare, education, and policy development.

Dr. Solis received a Bachelor of Arts in literature and writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a Master’s of Science in Nursing and a DNP from Frontier Nursing University.

Her research focuses on creating access to waterbirth in hospital settings, bias-informed communication strategies, increasing access to midwifery care for clients affected by obesity, cannabis use in pregnancy, and strategies to address moral distress and burnout for midwives and all healthcare providers. She practices as a full-scope CNM in Seattle and teach the clinical (NCLIN) series at University of Washington, is a board member for Nurses for Sexual and Reproductive Health, and an active member of the American College of Nurse Midwives, Midwives for Universal Healthcare and the National Black Midwives Association.