Ibis Reproductive Health

2008-2010

Davida Becker
Julia Steinberg
Danielle Bessett
Silvia De Zordo
Megan Kavanaugh
Alison Norris

Fellows based at Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
Davida Becker received a PhD in public health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a MS from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a BA from the University of California at Berkeley. Her research interests relate to the accessibility and quality of reproductive health services. For her dissertation, she studied US women’s perceptions of the quality of family planning care and explored racial, ethnic, and language group differences in clients’ service experiences, using both quantitative and qualitative research methods. She also has reproductive health research experience in the Latin America and the Caribbean region, where she spent two years working as a Regional Project Coordinator at the Population Council’s Mexico City office, on topics such as emergency contraception, abortion public opinion, and sexually transmitted infections. During her fellowship, Dr. Becker will continue to study the quality and accessibility of reproductive health services, expanding her focus to include abortion services. She is interested in learning more about clients’ abortion service experiences and their expectations surrounding care, and how these may vary by factors such as race/ethnicity, immigration status, generational status, and socio-economic status.

Julia Steinberg received a PhD in Psychology from Arizona State University and a BA from the University of Toledo. At the broadest level, her research interests encompass the self and identity. For her dissertation, she studied how threats to the self arising from stereotypes about women's math abilities affect women persisting in mathematical fields. As an Ellertson Fellow, she intends to draw on her training in social and quantitative psychology to conduct research on how the self and identity affect women's pregnancy decisions and the effect of such decisions on women's selves. First, she plans to examine the role of stigma, feminine identity, and career identity in women's decisions regarding unintended pregnancies and how they cope with such pregnancies. She also intends to explore how violence, unintended pregnancy, and pregnancy outcomes relate to the self and mental health.

Fellow based at Ibis Reproductive Health
Danielle Bessett received a PhD in Sociology from New York University and a BA from Mount Holyoke College. Her dissertation is a multi-method study of reproductive experiences and inequities as they are reflected in longitudinal interviews with 64 pregnant women in the Northeastern U.S. and explores how these women define a “normal” pregnancy. Her research interests include pregnancy, abortion, reproductive rights, medicine, gender, family and inequality. As an Ellertson Fellow, she intends to develop her dissertation into a book, enhancing its accessibility for practitioners, policymakers, and popular audiences, as well as to embark on a new study of the effect of previous abortions on women’s experiences of pregnancy.

Fellow based at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University
Silvia De Zordo received a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in September 2008, and her BA is from the University of Pavia in Italy. Her doctoral dissertation is on state reproductive health policies and their impacts on the lives and fertility of working class, black women in Bahia (Brazil). Her research interests encompass family planning, contraception and abortion in Latin America, as well as gender and race studies, among other areas. As an Ellertson Fellow, she intends to draw on her training in social anthropology and to build on her dissertation work to investigate health professionals’ moral and religious convictions and their perceptions of legal and illegal abortion in Brazil. She anticipates continued collaboration with Brazilian partners, including the Women and Health Research Center of the Federal University of Bahia which is concurrently researching legal abortion in the Northeast of Brazil.

Fellow based at the Guttmacher Institute
Megan Kavanaugh received a DrPH and MPH in Behavioral and Community Health Sciences at the Graduate School of Public Health and a Master’s Certificate in Women’s Studies, all from the University of Pittsburgh, and a BS in bioengineering from Cornell University. Her dissertation research examined women's prospective pregnancy intentions and explored contextual factors that impacted the experience and management of unintended pregnancy among low-income, minority and young women. She has previously served as the Principal Investigator on two separate research studies related to emergency contraception counseling, provision and use. Dr. Kavanaugh’s research interests include using the Social Determinants of Health framework to understand existing sexual and reproductive health disparities and broadening reproductive health discourse from an individually focused paradigm to acknowledge contextual and structural factors that impact how women manage their fertility and make reproductive health decisions. As an Ellertson Fellow, she intends to draw on her quantitative and qualitative research training to understand the role of abortion providers in helping women avoid subsequent unintended pregnancies and abortions.

Fellow based at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University
Alison Norris received a PhD in Epidemiology and Public Health, her MD from Yale University and her BA from Yale College. In her dissertation research, she used a combination of epidemiologic and ethnographic methodologies to examine the contextual influences on sexuality, sexual behaviors and sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevalence for residents of a sugar cane plantation in northern Tanzania. Dr. Norris's research interests encompass the social and context-specific determinants of health and illness, particularly in the areas of sexual and reproductive health. She intends to bring her epidemiological and clinical training to bear on under-explored issues in reproductive health, particularly access to safe abortion for underserved populations of women. During her fellowship, she plans to investigate how abortion is understood, sought and experienced in Tanzania, where it is illegal except as a lifesaving procedure.