NicholasARubashkinMDPhD(He/Him)

Summary

• As a physician-scientist, I currently work at UCSF in two capacities: 1. Obstetric inpatient hospitalist, and 2. NIH-funded Women's Reproductive Health Research (WRHR) scholar.
  
  In my research I study how the ever-increasing medicalization of birth is often at the expense of women's rights, particularly within marginalized populations. For example, my PhD dissertation—"The Maternal Fetal Medicine Units (MFMU) Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC) Calculator: statistics and ‘race’ in an ethnography of obstetric thinking" —considered how the racial algorithm that formerly undergirded the VBAC calculator shunted Brown and Black women toward more repeat C-sections and therefore put them at a higher risk for life-threatening downstream maternal health issues like placenta accreta.
  
  With my WRHR scholarship I will continue my VBAC research with a long-term goal to become an independent investigator with expertise in developing and implementing instruments that increase the uptake of evidence-based practices by clinicians in order to deter unnecessary birth medicalization, improve clinical and RMC outcomes, and equalize clinical access and RMC for marginalized populations.