Nadia Diamond-Smith, PhD, MS
Nadia Diamond-Smith is an Associate Professor in the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department and Institute for Global Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Her expertise is in maternal and reproductive health in the developing world, with a focus on gender inequality/women's empowerment, family planning and abortion, nutrition, and the preconception, pregnancy and postpartum periods. She is a public health demographer, and did her dissertation research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on trends and causes of son preference and uneven child sex ratios in India. Much of her research is in South Asia, although she also works in Africa, elsewhere in Asia, in the US and Latin America. She uses mixed method approaches to research, intervention development, and evaluation.
She currently has 3 R01s in India including (1) an RCT of a group life skills and reproductive health empowerment intervention for newly married women on their ability to avoid unintended pregnancy; (2) studying women's migration to their natal homes in pregnancy and its impact on health care use and outcomes and (3) an RCT of a postpartum mhealth social support intervention. She has also been involved with a number of interventions using social media for data collection and interventions, including among indigenous populations in Guatemala and in California. She teaches courses in Demography; Research Ethics and Practice and Equity Issues in Reproductive Health at UCSF.