Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG
Dr. Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG (she/her), is the Chief Black Feminist Physician Scientist, Founding CEO, and Owner of Birthing Cultural Rigor, LLC, with nearly 30 years of supporting women, girls, and gender expansive people across the sexual, reproductive and perinatal life course. Based in Tennessee, Dr. Scott is a national and international speaker about the ways in which obstetric racism violates the humanity, bodies, and lives of Black women, girls, and gender expansive people throughout health services design, provision, evaluation, and training, in the afterlife of slavery. As an improvement and implementation scientist activist, community OBGYN, and applied epidemiologist grounded in a Black feminist-reproductive justice praxis, she developed the first and only validated Patient Reported Experience Measure of obstetric racism© (the PREM-OB Scale™ Suite), which is now available for implementation, spread, and scale as prevention and mitigation against obstetric racism.
At the end of 2021, Dr. Scott relocated to her birthplace in Nashville, Tennessee, to expand her activism and scholarship throughout the South and Midwest. In 2022, Black Mamas Matter Alliance hosted the Black Maternal Health Conference and Training Institute and recognized Dr. Scott as an unsung hero in public health related to infant and maternal mortality prevention by selecting her to receive the Inaugural Jackson, Rowley, and Hogan Excellence in Black Maternal Health Scholarship, in honor of the foremothers of Black Maternal Health scholarship and practice. Currently, she is the proud developer and principal investigator of the first and only Black community-led multi-state quality and safety program to address obstetric racism during childbirth hospitalization and postpartum called The CATCH Pilot, Community-led Accountability and Transformation in Care experiences and Hospital culture. She also serves on the Tennessee Fetal Infant Mortality Review Committee and Tennessee Maternal Mortality Review Committee Taskforce. Dr. Scott is also an affiliated investigator with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health.