Christine Santoro is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Health Justice and Bioethics and in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Temple’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine. She is also the Director of Community-Engaged Research for the Center’s Program for Maternal Health Equity. Christine has been a Certified Professional Midwife since 2002 and has served as a community midwife and reproductive justice advocate in the Philadelphia region and South Jersey for over 20 years. She holds a BS in public health from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MA from Temple University in Urban Bioethics. For over two decades, her work has been dedicated to supporting pregnant women and birthing people and their families in having safe, healthy and respectful pregnancy, birth and postpartum experiences. She has a particular research interest in the use of relationship-based models of care, such as midwifery and community-doula models, to reduce and ultimately eliminate perinatal racial health disparities. Professor Santoro is also a leader in developing, evaluating and scaling best practices for multidirectional collaboration and transfers of care between community-based and hospital-based perinatal providers and settings. Her emerging work focuses on advancing epistemic diversity and embodied practice in health system knowledge ecosystems and medical education. In addition, Christine has a deep commitment to lifelong practice in antiracism work and to designing and evaluating trainings, action tools, and practices to support racial justice within birth and perinatal organizations and institutions, in partnership with leaders from directly impacted communities.
