Culture & Justice Quorum Leadership

Audra Meadows, MD, MPH
Vice Chair of Culture & Justice, Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, & Reproductive Sciences

Dr. Meadows is a birth optimizer and health equity champion. She cares for women before, during and after pregnancy to ensure positive pregnancy and birth experiences. As an Obstetrician/Gynecologist and maternal health advocate, Dr. Meadows actively investigates strategies to optimize infant and maternal outcomes and to eliminate racial inequities associated with birth. For more than 15 years, she has been passionate about achieving health equity and creating value in clinical practice.

Dr. Meadows completed her medical education at the University of Texas at San Antonio, her OB/GYN residency training at The Brigham & Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School and the Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership at the Harvard School of Public Health. She previously served as Medical Director of the BWH Ambulatory Obstetrics Practice and the City of Boston’s maternal child health programs. This fall she joined the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at UC San Diego, where she will devote time to prenatal care practice innovation, advocacy, and medical student and resident education. She is the founding director of the Maternal Innovation Collaborative that seeks to innovate and optimize care and experiences of pregnancy. This novel center will seek to innovate clinical strategies to prevent preterm birth and better serve those pregnant and parenting.

Abroad, she co-directs the Perinatal Neonatal Quality Improvement Network of Massachusetts (PNQIN), the state PQC for MA, and serves as faculty and board member for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Better Maternal Outcomes project and the Institute for Perinatal Quality Improvement. In this work, she leads quality improvement projects to promote “teaming” and tools that improve obstetric safety and equity.

She is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Leaders Research Scholar and NIH-funded researcher investigating strategies to prevent maternal morbidity and achieve equity with a particular emphasis on including the voices of those pregnant and parenting in identifying these strategies.