LAMHPP Maternal Mental Health Conference
Registration for LAMHPP's Maternal Mental Health Conference is now open!
Register for the FREE event today!
List of Speakers
Renee Bruno, MD
Dr. Bruno is a psychiatrist in the clinical practice of Women’s Mental Health and Reproductive Psychiatry. Her experience includes outpatient, inpatient , consult-liaison and academic psychiatry. Dr. Bruno is Medical Director of selected psychiatric services at Woman’s Hospital in Baton Rouge, LA and teaches residents in both psychiatry and OB/GYN. She serves as the perinatal psychiatry expert consultant for LAMHPP.
Kara Brown, MD
Dr. Brown is a reproductive psychiatrist currently practicing at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System. She completed her medical school training at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and her psychiatric residency at the McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University. She completed a fellowship in women’s mental health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and subsequently stayed on faculty at Brigham, where she served as a psychiatrist for the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program for Moms and the women’s mental health fellowship director. Since relocating to New Orleans two years ago, she has served female veterans as one of the site’s women’s mental health champions and has continued teaching efforts with Tulane’s Psychiatry and OBGYN departments.
Meghan Howell, MD
Dr. Howell is a complex care pediatrician and clinician scientist at Tulane School of Medicine whose clinical and academic interest is in the longitudinal care of high-risk infants and their caregivers. She has a special interest in infants after their discharge from the NICU, as well as building collaborative models of care that support both infant and caregiver well-being. In 2017, she opened and now directs the Tulane NICU Graduate Clinic, a multidisciplinary clinic that provides care coordination, developmental follow-up and maternal mental health screenings for our infants following NICU discharge. Her research interests include how to utilize non-pharmacological treatments in the NICU to support both infant physiological regulation but also caregiver mental health.
Joia Adele Crear-Perry, MD, FACOG
Dr. Crear-Perry is a thought leader around racism as a root cause of health inequities, speaker, trainer, advocate, policy expert, and fighter for justice. She is the founder and president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative. Recently, she addressed the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to urge a human rights framework to improve maternal mortality. Previously, she served as the Executive Director of the Birthing Project, Director of Women’s and Children’s Services at Jefferson Community Healthcare Center and as the Director of Clinical Services for the City of New Orleans Health. Currently, her focus has expanded nationally and internationally as it relates to maternal and child health. Dr. Crear-Perry has received funding from the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to work with the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) to develop a Standard for Respectful Maternity Care and serves on the Joint Commission Perinatal Safety Project Technical Advisory Panel. She currently serves on the Advisory Committee of the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, Principal at Health Equity Cypher and on the Board of Trustees for Community Catalyst, National Medical Association, and the UCSF PTBi.
Catherine Monk, PhD
Dr. Monk is Professor of Medical Psychology in the Departments of Obstetrics & Gynecology (Ob/Gyn) and Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, and Research Scientist VI at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Director of Women’s Mental Health @Ob/Gyn, an initiative to embed mental health care in primary care. Dr. Monk’s research brings together perinatal psychiatry, developmental psychobiology, and neuroscience to focus on the earliest influences on children’s developmental trajectories — those that happen in utero and how to intervene early to help women and prevent risk for mental health disorders in the future children. She is internationally recognized for her contributions to the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease Research model, which increasingly is gaining traction in demonstrating that there is a third pathway for the familial inheritance of mental illness: in addition to shared genes and the postnatal environment, factors in the prenatal environment play a role as well. Specifically, her studies have identified maternal prenatal depression effects on child outcomes, including variation in fetal behavior, placental DNA methylation, and newborn brain development.
