Monica McLemore
Monica Rose McLemore (born 1969) is an American nurse and associate professor of Family Health Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work centers on reproductive justice and improving healthcare for marginalized communities, with the aim of ending health inequalities. Born prematurely, she decided to become a nurse at eight years old. She studied nursing at The College of New Jersey and earned a Master of Public Health at San Francisco State University. She pursued graduate studies at UCSF, including a 2010 thesis titled An evaluation of the molecular species of CA125 across the three phases of the menstrual cycle, which explored a tumor-associated antigen CA125. Her research links physical and mental health in low-income communities of color, grounded in reproductive justice theory, which holds that people have the right to decide if and how to give birth. She launched the Saving Our Ladies from early births And Reducing Stress (SOLARS) study to examine how stress, anxiety, and racism affect gestational duration in Black and Latina women. She is part of the preterm birth initiative PTBi-California, which works to reduce preterm births among marginalized groups by partnering with clinicians and educators. In 2020 she retired from clinical nursing to focus on research on Black maternal health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she studied the disease’s impact during pregnancy and why Black Americans were disproportionately affected. McLemore has written for Scientific American, Vice, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 02:51 (CET).