CREATE Study Team:
Principal Investigator - Dr. Brittany D. Chambers, PhD, MPH
Program Director – Helen Arega , MA
CREATE Mentors:
Dr. Cynthia Harper, PhD, Co-Mentor
Dr. Miriam Kupperman, PhD, MPH, Co-Mentor
CREATE Stakeholder Advisory Board Members
- Rashon Armstrong
Rahson is a 27-year-old first time mother to an bright young man. She is a continuing student. Rashon is also an advocate for justice, and a Black woman bringing awareness to others about racial and social disparities within the healthcare system.
- JoNisha Faulkne
- Brandi Gates-Burgess, IBCLC
Brandi Gates-Burgess is a graduate of California State University, Eastbay, a mother of four exclusively breastfed children and a passionate breastfeeding advocate. She began her work at Alameda County WIC program where she worked as a Breastfeeding Specialist. Her efforts focused on supporting teens and young parents who planned to continue to exclusively breastfeed while returning to work or school. Currently, Brandi works for West Oakland Health as the Breastfeeding Coordinator and Lactation Consultant for the WIC program and Health Center. She also provides affordable in-home lactation support for Bay Area residents and evening to late night lactation care at Highland Hospital. Brandi Co-chairs the Breastfeeding Cultural Outreach Taskforce (BCOT) and sits on the Community Advisory Board for the UCSF Preterm Birth Initiative. While working with the Black mamas in East and West Oakland it was obvious that additional peer breastfeeding support was needed. To meet the need, Brandi created and facilitates the Breast Friends Mommy Group an African American focused support group for pregnant and breastfeeding mamas. Since its creation Brandi and the Breast Friends team has supported over 500 mamas and babies in the East and West Oakland Area. In her spare time, Brandi attends paint nights and loves to dance. She has a heart for her community and believes every family should have the proper resources, information and support to make an informed decision in meeting their infant feeding goals.
- Julie Harris
Julie Harris is a native of San Francisco. She is working as a consultant on numerous reproductive justice projects in San Francisco and Oakland. Julie is an expert on the health disparities and outcomes of Black / African descent and POC in the Bay Area. She has dedicated her work to improve the disparities impacting melanated and marginalized communities. Julie is a mother of three children. She has had family very close to her experience preterm births, which has made it a cause she holds close to the chest. Julie would like saturation in awareness of PTB and increased knowledge of preconception health in the Bay Area.
- Maura Jones, MD
Maura Jones is a native of Louisiana and current Obstetrics & Gynecology resident physician at UCSF. She completed her undergraduate degree at Xavier University of Louisiana, where she majored in Biology with double minors in Chemistry and Spanish. She went on to receive her medical degree from LSU School of Medicine, in New Orleans. She chose Obstetrics & Gynecology because she strives to empower women at every age and every stage to be knowledgeable and make autonomous decisions about their bodies. She plans to subspecialize in Maternal-Fetal Medicine and is particularly interested health equity, racism & perinatal outcomes, preterm birth, hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, and quality improvement and patient safety.
[ Outside of her busy schedule as a resident, she is a wife, dog-mom, and creator of “Mocha In Medicine”, a blog that features various aspects of her journey through medicine as a woman of color, and also allows her to mentor others interested in medicine. You can follow her on Instagram @mochainmedicine. ]
- Diana C. Roble, MD
Dr. Diana C. Robles is a Maternal-Fetal Medicine Fellow at the University of California in San Francisco. Her clinical and research interests include maternal hypertensive disorders, maternal cardiac disease, and health equity, with particular focus on language barriers in obstetric care. A native of the US-Mexico Border region in Southern Arizona, Dr. Robles earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her medical degree from Stanford University School of Medicine. She completed her OBGYN residency training at UCSF. During her fellowship she has served on the GME Diversity Advisory Group as a Fellow Champion and is a co-instructor of the Medical Spanish Course for UCSF medical students.
- Josephine Urbina, MD
Originally from East Los Angeles, CA, Dr. Josephine Urbina has seen the barriers to care that affect our most marginalized communities. It is with this knowledge that she decided to pursue her medical degree after working for 5 years in the Biotech industry. Dr. Urbina completed her medical training at Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara and saw first-hand the patriarchal birth practices and coercion many Latinx immigrant women in the US have experienced. She went on to complete her specialty training in Obstetrics & Gynecology at Jersey Shore University Medical Center in New Jersey and is currently completing a subspecialty fellowship in Complex Family Planning. She is adamant about improving inequities for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BiPOC) by bridging the gap between minority-led research and the practice of medicine. Her research interests include racially congruent care, abortion care in Latinx community and Latinx-centered group prenatal care.
- Sara Whetstone, MD
Dr. Sara Whetstone is a clinician-educator whose work is grounded in the principles of reproductive justice and health equity. Her work as an academic specialist in general obstetrics and gynecology has been informed by my long-term commitment to improving the health and well-being of Black women and those who have been marginalized by our medical system. Dr. Whetstone’s academic work has focused on aligning educational and clinical training to the needs of our population by centering the experiences of the most underserved individuals and communities. In her role as Associate Residency Program Director, she has worked tirelessly around issues of workforce diversity and have developed an innovative curriculum that prioritizes social justice and structural competency. Additionally, she serves as one of the Associate Directors for the Black Women's Health and Livelihood Initiative and the Interim Vice Chair of Equity, Inclusion, and Structural Change for the UCSF Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, & Reproductive Sciences.
- Hope Williams
