My goal is to support self-realization through pregnancy and birth, and a peaceful transition for a growing family. The enduring thread along the path to my consciousness as a midwife, and as an academic, is my commitment to serve families across birth settings and across cultures. I am the mother of four remarkable young women. Most important to my growth as midwife, though, has been my own journey as a parent. I have learned much from families who are engaged in the participatory action research projects at my lab. I am currently Professor of Midwifery and Principal of the Birth Place Lab at UBC, where my research examines equity and access to high quality, inclusive, and respectful care during pregnancy and childbirth. I have also enjoyed teaching midwifery and medical students across the US and Canada.īefore moving to Vancouver in 2007 to be Director of the Division of Midwifery at UBC, I was on faculty at Yale, and my clinic, Birth & Beyond, a full-scope private midwifery practice, prepared Yale midwifery and medical students for practice in community settings. Over the last 35 years, I have been privileged to witness the transformative power of birth while serving women in my own midwifery practices in the San Francisco Bay area, Indianapolis, Connecticut, and Vancouver. In 1985, I received a Master of Science in Nursing and Midwifery from Yale University, and in 2019 a Doctoral degree from the School of Medicine at the University of Sydney. I was immersed in pregnancy as normalcy, and exposed to women working with women. By the time I was a teenager, they took me along when they cared for families, sometimes in the Bombay slums, in rural settings, in tertiary care hospitals, emergency rooms, and maternity homes. During the summers I visited India to meet my large extended family, of whom five were obstetric providers. My midwifery education began in my mother's home, a mecca for the pregnant and nursing mothers in the growing Indian community at Penn State University.

I am an Indian woman who grew up between India and the United States.

Undisturbed birth