Stacie Geller, PhD
Principal Investigator
Stacie Geller, Ph.D. is G. William Arends Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University Of Illinois College Of Medicine. She is the Director of the UIC Center for Research on Women and Gender and the National Center of Excellence in Women's Health. In her role as director of two UIC centers, she promotes collaborative multidisciplinary work related to women's lives. Dr. Geller is a health services researcher and epidemiologist with expertise in women's health issues, complimentary and alternative medicine, maternal mortality and morbidity, and has published extensively in these areas. She has a well established national and international research career and has been awarded numerous research grants from NIH and other federal agencies and foundations. Dr. Geller has also been actively involved in leadership and mentoring activities for women and under-represented minorities on the UIC campus.

Dr. Geller has been studying maternal mortality and morbidity since 1999. She was the Principal Investigator of a CDC/ASPH cooperative agreement "Investigation of factors associated with maternal mortality." She developed an innovative model for early identification of high-risk women that has garnered national attention. Dr. Geller's work in maternal mortality and morbidity extends to international circles where she recently completed a 5-year NICHD randomized clinical trail comparing the use of oral misoprostol compared to standard of care to reduce postpartum hemorrhage in rural India. She is currently working with the Macarthur Foundation and Pathfinder International to implement a continuum of care model to reduce postpartum hemorrhage in India, Nigeria, and Ghana.

Dr. Geller has been working with the state of Illinois for the past 10 years to enhance surveillance for maternal mortality and morbidity. She was a founding member of and currently sits on the Illinois Maternal Mortality Review Committee and is responsible for review of preventability issues for all maternal deaths in the state.

Over the past several years, Dr. Geller has mentored a number of PhD candidates, primarily in the School of Public Health and the College of Nursing as well as a number of clinical postdoctoral fellows in the College of Medicine. She has also worked closely with junior faculty for training and career planning. Prior to being funded for the BIRCWH program, in collaboration with Dr. Tonda Hughes, she established the Interdisciplinary Women's Health Research (IWHR) program to provide senior faculty support to junior faculty who are interested in women's health research. Junior faculty scholars are advised by an interdisciplinary group of senior women's health research faculty and are paired with two senior faculty mentors. Mentoring activities address research proposal development, research methodology, preparation of materials for publication and presentation, funding, and other research issues.

Sarah Kilpatrick, MD, PhD
Program Director and Co-Investigator
Sarah Kilpatrick, MD, PhD is Professor and Head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Vice Dean for the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a nationally known Maternal Fetal Medicine specialist. She received her PhD in Biopsychology at the University of Chicago, and her MD at Tulane University School of Medicine. She did her OBGYN residency and Maternal Fetal Medicine (MFM) fellowship at University of California, San Francisco and is board certified in Obstetrics & Gynecology and in Maternal Fetal Medicine. She is a member of the Board of Directors and is the Secretary/Treasurer for the Society of Maternal Fetal Medicine, and she is on the MFM Division of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Dr. Kilpatrick is Chair of the Obstetric Practice Committee of American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG).

Dr. Kilpatrick has over 50 publications, multiple chapters and over 100 invited talks. Her research interests lie in clinical obstetrics including maternal morbidity and mortality, very preterm birth management and outcomes, pharmacokinetics of therapeutic drugs in pregnancy and labor. Since coming to UIC in 1999, she has focused on promoting collaborative research between other sites, other health care colleges at UIC, and between departments in the School of Medicine. These efforts are illustrated in her list of funded projects on which she has been a co-investigator. These include the College of Nursing, the College of Pharmacy and the School of Public Health. In addition, she is a mentor on the recently funded K30 grant to Dr Zwanziger from the School of Public Health. Finally, under the direction of Dr Kilpatrick over the last four years, the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology has become a research site for multiple multicentered trials including: University of Toronto Multicourses of Antenatal Steroids trial, Obstetrix cerclage and PPROM trial, FDA funded multicentered prospective study of pharmacokinetics of antibiotics in pregnancy (Dr Fischer PI, School of Pharmacy), and the NICHD Consortium on Safe Labor trail (Dr Hibbard PI).

Dr. Kilpatrick has received multiple teaching awards and is an actively sought after participant in the teaching of medical students, OB GYN residents, and CNM students. She received the 2007 March of Dimes Jonas Salk Physician award. She practices MFM in an inner city hospital with a large volume of high risk obstetric patients. The most common medical diseases seen in this setting are hypertensive disorders, diabetes and obesity.

Tonda Hughes, PhD, RN, FAAN
Co-Investigator
Tonda Hughes is a Professor in Nursing and Public Health and Director of Research for the UIC National Center of Excellence in Women's Health. She is also a Visiting Senior Scientist at The Fenway Institute of Fenway Community Health (Boston, MA) and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne in the Department of General Practice. Her research focuses on substance abuse among vulnerable populations of women. She is well known for her early research on chemically dependent nurses and is an internationally recognized expert in the area of alcohol use among lesbians. She has published extensively in the area of lesbian health, including the book Mental Health Issues for Sexual Minority Women (Haworth Press, 2003). She directs the Chicago Health and Life Experiences of Women (CHLEW), a study funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1999 and the first longitudinal research to focus on lesbian health.

Dr. Hughes teaches graduate courses in women's health and supervises a number of master's and doctoral level students' research projects. She received the Graduate Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award in 1996 and served as coordinator of the graduate mental health nursing specialty from 1999-2002. In addition to her work with the UIC BIRCWH program Dr. Hughes serves as faculty on several other training grants including the AIDS International Research Training Program, Training in Primary Health Care Nursing Research, and Reducing Disparities in Underserved Populations.

Dr. Hughes has served as consultant or advisory to a number of federal agencies, including the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse (NIAAA) and the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT). She is currently a member of CSAT's National Cultural Competency Network, Consensus Panel on Cultural Competency in Substance Abuse Treatment, and Consensus Panel on the Specific Needs of Women in Substance Abuse Treatment. She consults with numerous researchers nationally and internationally.

Recognition of Dr. Hughes' work with vulnerable populations includes awards from the Chicago Lesbian Community Cancer Project, the Oak Park Area Gay and Lesbian Association, the National Nurses' Society on Addictions, and Sigma Theta Tau International. She was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 2003 and is a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing.

Dr. Hughes' current research projects include: Sexual Identity and Drinking: A Longitudinal Follow-up (PI), Sexual Orientation, Mental Health, and Substance Use and Abuse (co-I), Examining Health Risks Across Sexual Identity Groups in the Australian Longitudinal Study of Women’s Health (PI), and Childhood Victimization and Health: Meaning Making in the Contexts of Race/Ethnicity and Sexual Orientation (Co-PI)

Arden Handler, DrPH
Evaluation Director
Arden Handler is a Professor in the Community Health Sciences Division of the School of Public Health, PI and Co-Director of the Maternal and Child Health Program and Dierctor of the MCH Epidemiology Program. Dr. Handler's research has traditionally focused on factors associated with adverse pregnancy and perinatal outcomes, with a particular emphasis on access to, satisfaction with, and utilization of prenatal care. She has a solid background in the use of epidemiologic methods for the evaluation of public health programs and has been a leader in developing a conceptual framework for the study of the public health care delivery system. Currently, she is involved in evaluation research with a number of projects focused on improving the health of women and infants including "Healthy Births for Healthy Communities" (an infant mortality reduction project with outreach and interconceptional care foci in two Chicago communities), and Illinois Healthy Women (evaluation of the Illinois' Medicaid Family Planning Waiver). In addition, she is the UIC PI for the National Children's Study (Cook, DuPage and Will counties), a longitudinal cohort study of the effects of environmental influences on 100,000 children nationwide; their mothers will be recruited prior to pregnancy and they will be followed from birth through early adulthood. UIC is partnering with Northwestern University (Lead PI) and the University of Chicago in this study.