My dedication to becoming a nurse has always been underpinned by a need to address health disparities and support underserved communities. However, I wasn’t always sure how to encompass all of my passions into one profession. I was drawn to working with unhoused populations, advocating for reproductive justice and abortion access, and supporting immigrant communities who, like my own immigrant mother, experience hesitancy in engaging with healthcare systems. These values stem from my upbringing, whether my father’s acts of kindness toward unhoused individuals, or my mother’s Japanese culture steeped in community care and selflessness. Exploring our country’s history of structural racism and inequity through previous coursework has also informed my dedication, such as a pilgrimage through the South where I confronted the structural racism and inequity woven into our society. I find it impossible to learn this history without feeling compelled to act against systems of marginalization. During my health equity course at the UW School of Nursing, Dr. Monica McLemore’s presentation on nurse-midwifery emboldened me to explore the profession and its connection to public health further. She helped me see nurse-midwifery as a role that connects clinical care with systemic advocacy, and that ties individual health with broader community wellness. In a follow-up conversation, Dr. McLemore also emphasized working “shoulder to shoulder” with communities to foster meaningful, practical, community-driven interventions. Similarly, a conversation with Dr. Wendy Barrington further reinforced the need for healthcare providers to be thought partners with communities to create meaningful impact, like with the Good Black Birth Project. She highlighted the necessity of nurse leadership in advocating for marginalized voices and driving systemic change. Examining history highlights this need even further, as nurse-midwifery has its roots in the contributions of Indigenous, immigrant, and African American granny midwives, whose work has been systematically erased through campaigns driven by racism and eugenics. This history extends beyond textbooks, limiting access to careers in healthcare and driving disparities in maternal and infant mortality rates in our country. This is why I find it so important to understand the history of our country in order to know how the DNP nurse-midwife role can be used as a platform for advocacy. In clinical care, I hope to use the nurse-midwife role to offer long-term, relationship-based care that ensures no aspect of wellness is overlooked- from accessing medications to understanding diagnostic procedures. My experiences in transitional care, nursing homes, and my clinical placement at NeighborCare caring for housing insecure folks, have all also reinforced my dedication to trauma-informed care provided to and within communities. The comprehensive scope of nurse-midwifery, including primary, reproductive, and sexual health care across the lifespan, affords you the privilege of caring for folks through both bookends of life. This means you are also able to identify the social determinants of health impacting life at every stage, unique needs, and key intervention points for health improvement. Furthermore, the patient population being folks in need of gynecological, peripartum, and perimenopausal care provides close proximity and insight into the experiences of all oppressed identities, as the intersectional nature of systemic oppression disproportionately affects women of color and those who are gender-diverse. Reproductive and chronic pain in particular are matters significant to me, as I have lived most of my life accustomed to the reality of immense and consistent reproductive pain that was often normalized- reflecting a broader neglect of female and gender-diverse experiences in healthcare. Witnessing the lack of awareness around pain management for procedures like IUD insertions and pap smears among peers has also fueled my dedication to spreading education and engaging in trauma-informed care.

My favorite scientific discovery is an often leaned-on pillar of microbiology: agar. The discovery of this invaluable resource is often credited to Robert Koch, while in reality, it was the wife of one of his associates, Fannie Hesse, who suggested its use. Fannie worked as an unpaid assistant for her husband in Koch’s lab and supported research by preparing environments for bacteria to grow in, cleaning equipment, and making illustrations for publications. As her husband and Koch struggled to find a growth medium that could overcome the limitations of gelatin, Fannie suggested using agar. When her husband notified Koch of the new technique, he immediately added it to his nutrient broths but made no mention of the Hesses’ vital contributions in his 1882 paper discussing the discovery. Agar is an indispensable tool in the microbiology laboratory, namely due to characteristics like the ability to withstand high temperatures and degradation by many microbes, among others. Without agar, we would not be able to perform critical procedures like streaking for isolation or making plate counts to determine dilutions. However, what makes this discovery my favorite is that it highlights the vital roles played by women throughout STEM fields and encourages conversations regarding the necessity of acknowledging these contributions. In my research of Fannie, I read sources that clarified how her illustrations were drawn so accurately that they supported a strong understanding of microbiology. I think that even the fact we would need evidence to prove Fannie really understood what she was doing illuminates the assumption of ignorance placed on many women. Overall, Fannie not only contributed a whole world of advancement and potential to the field of microbiology but did so while being disregarded on account of her gender; subsequently illuminating barriers faced by women in STEM fields even into the modern-day.