About the Author

Marit L. Bovbjerg, PhD, MS is an assistant professor of epidemiology at Oregon State University, and an advocate of Open Access. As an undergraduate, she studied music and chemistry at the University of Virginia, receiving her Master’s degree in Health Evaluation Sciences from that same institution in 2002. She then worked as a clinical research coordinator at the UVa Medical Center for several years before beginning her doctoral training in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been on the faculty at OSU since 2009. She has taught introductory epidemiology to undergraduates, graduate students in public health and related fields, midwives, medical students, and medical residents and fellows.

Dr. Bovbjerg’s research program focuses on maternity care in the US, with particular interest in midwifery, community birth, and doula care. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, including the 2016 Article of the Year in the Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health (on waterbirth) and a recent methods paper questioning the utility of Apgar scores in research, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Dr. Bovbjerg writes the bi-monthly “Current Resources for Evidence-Based Practice” column for the Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing. She has presented her work at numerous national and international conferences. She is the co-director of both the Uplift Research and Health Equity Laboratory and the Community Doula Program. Her work has been funded by HRSA, NIH, the Foundation for the Advancement of Midwifery, and the InterCommunity Health Network, among others. During the 2019-2020 academic year, she was appointed as a Fulbright Scholar to the National Perinatal Epidemiology Centre, University College Cork, Republic of Ireland.