Monica McLemore, RN, PhD

At the University of California, San Francisco, Monica McLemore is a tenured associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department, an affiliated scientist with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, and a member of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. I retired from clinical practice as a public health and staff nurse after a 28-year clinical nursing career. My program of research is grounded in reproductive justice, a lens I use to understand reproductive health and rights for people with the capacity for pregnancy. My work is grounded in the hypothesis that if we center the most marginalized people, care improves for everyone.

I conduct research across the reproductive spectrum including abortion, birth, cancer risk, contraception, family planning, and healthy sexuality, pleasure, and consent. My work exemplifies the combination of nursing, public health, and policy research using community engaged and embedded methods to develop programs to test and deliver interventions. 

I am fortunate to lead many learners at the masters, PhD, MD, postdoctoral and early career faculty development levels. The program I lead is geared toward rigorous science and translation of that work to the public. We maintain a commitment to social media and science communication as well as open source access of community members to conduct research analyses important to them. I currently am leading or collaborating on 8 funded studies from anonymous donors to PCORI to Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and believe that public scholarship is essential for authentic community engagement.

I currently have 81 peer reviewed articles, OpEds and commentaries and my research has been cited in the Huffington Post, Lavender Health, four amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States, and a National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report. My work has appeared in publications such as Dame Magazine, Politico, ProPublica/NPR and I made a voice appearance in Terrance Nance’s HBO series Random Acts of Flyness. My work was published in the 2019 Future of Medicine edition of Scientific American as a data visualization project entitled How To Fix Maternal Mortality: The First Step is to stop blaming women. I am an elected member of the governing council for Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) section of the American Public Health Association and am current chair of the SRH section (2020-2022). Finally, I am the recipient of numerous awards and was inducted into the American Academy of Nursing in October, 2019.