Karen A. Scott

Dr. Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG (she/her), proudly stands as 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.  Her work interrogates and transforms quality and patient safety paradigms through application of participatory multilevel quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods and methodologies that simultaneously operationalize Black feminism, reproductive justice, and research justice, at the intersection of cultural humility and scientific rigor, also known as cultural rigor. As an improvement and implementation scientist activist, boarded certified "dissident, recovering, and Midwiferized" OBGYN, and applied epidemiologist grounded, she and her team 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. Dr. Scott is also the author of SACKRED Birth: Mobilizing A New Quality Paradigm in Obstetric Care, a vital call for prioritizing Black mothers’ expectations, expressions, and experiences in clinical practice, decision making, and care delivery using new quality norms and methodologies to amplify the humanity and power, not pathology, of Black reproducing bodies and Black births. 

At the end of 2021, Dr. Scott relocated to her birthplace in Nashville, TN 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 in Washington, D.C. 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 serves on the Institutional Review Board Committee for Interfaith Voices for Reproductive Justice and Board of Directors for the Women In Medicine Legacy Foundation. Dr. Scott is also an affiliated investigator with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health. 

At the end of December 2024, she celebrated another milestone, the release of her first solo authored book, SACRED Birth: Mobilizing a New Quality Paradigm in Obstetric Care, published by Bloomsbury (formerly Lexington Books of Rowman and Littlefield). Dr Scott offers a new quality paradigm grounded in cultural rigor, lived experience, health equity, human rights, and social justice values. Through the SACKRED framework—Safety & accountability, Autonomy, Communication & information exchange, Kinship, Racism, Empathy & humanity, and Dignity in Blackness & holistic care—Dr. Scott reveals how we can redefine quality during childbirth hospitalization and rebuild care in our image. 

Dr. Scott obtained a BA in Molecular Biology from Kenyon College, an MD from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, an MPH in Applied Epidemiology from Emory University Rollins School of Public Health, and completed in intersectional feminist policy fellowship, with a focus on Reproductive Justice, from the Solís Policy Institute, Women’s Foundation California. 

Dr Scott now resides in the Pacific Northwest, creating new portals and paradigms of radical liberatory and loving care through the application of applied and critical medical anthropology in improvement and implementation science. She continues to nurture and nourish her growth, healing, learning, and unlearning as a Black feminist social scientist, humanist, and believer, committed to transforming how care is designed, delivered, and experienced.