Jacquelyn Taylor
Columbia University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Pregnancy and the weeks after birth can be dangerous in the United States, and the risk is not shared equally: Black women face far higher rates of severe maternal morbidity, maternal death and preterm birth than White women, even in cities dense with hospitals. A long-standing explanation is chronic stress tied to social conditions such as racism, income, neighborhood environment and food insecurity, but it has been hard to show exactly how those conditions translate into biological harm, or what interventions interrupt the chain.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
maternal health
severe maternal morbidity
maternal mortality
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2030
What they work on
- Test a doula-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy program for postpartum people in a Type 1 hybrid effectiveness-implementation trial, measuring cardiovascular, mental health and social-determinant outcomes while building trauma-informed service models and hospital-community care linkages.
- Estimate the health effects and excess costs attributable to social risk factors and severe maternal morbidity and mortality in New York, and evaluate two policy interventions intended to reduce maternal health disparities, using mixed methods.
- Establish a Community Engagement Core that provides ongoing community input, co-design of studies and dissemination, and a Career Development and Training Core that prepares early-stage investigators in community-partnered maternal health research.
- Test whether a 10-week live music intervention, versus a matched sham control, reduces stress-associated metabolites and metabolic pathways in 142 pregnant Black women, using metabolomic analysis of saliva collected at the 1st, 5th and 10th sessions.
- Determine whether the live music intervention improves birth outcomes including preterm birth, using labor and delivery record review, and apply the Music Characterization System to identify which musical features underlie any benefit.
More about the research
Both projects here work on that chain: one rebuilds the partnerships and systems around maternal care, the other tests a specific stress-reducing intervention and tracks its effects down to the level of individual metabolites.
Why it matters
Severe maternal morbidity, maternal death and preterm birth remain unacceptably common in the United States and fall hardest on Black women and their infants. Testing a doula-delivered therapy, two state policy options and a live music intervention offers concrete candidates for reducing that burden, while metabolomic measurements could reveal which biological pathways carry social stress into pregnancy outcomes and serve as markers for future interventions. The partnership and training structures are intended to leave lasting capacity for community-driven maternal health research in New York.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
New York Community-Hospital-Academic Maternal Health Partnerships (NY-CHAMP)
NIH · Aug 2023 – Jul 2030
The impact of a culturally based live music intervention on the metabolites and metabolic pathways associated with chronic stress and the risk of preterm birth in Black women
NIH · Apr 2023 – Nov 2027
Closest labs
Lauren Osborne
Columbia University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether the doula-delivered LHMoms program lowers postpartum depression, improves cardiovascular health and raises quality of life compared with an attention control, in a randomized trial of 450 patients at three New York City hospital sites.
Paula Alio
University of Rochester, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Explore Black fathers' group and individual experiences with perinatal care in Rochester, New York, through listening sessions with 40 fathers and interviews with 20 fathers.
Stacy Bartlett
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Evaluate current postpartum care models, including Fourth Trimester Care (4TM) with its two-week first visit, using quantitative electronic health record data from local health care sites.
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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