From left: Krishna Upadhya, Lois McCloskey, Cherrie Evans, Gene Declercq

Maternal and Child Health Center of Excellence

Alums Honored for National and International Equity Work in Maternal and Child Health

At its 27th annual reception, the Maternal and Child Health Center of Excellence at SPH awarded the 2023 Maternal and Child Health Alumni Award to alums Krishna Upadhya (SPH’98) and Cherrie Lynn Evans (SPH’09).

For nearly 30 years, the Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health (MCH CoE) at the School of Public Health has celebrated alums for their outstanding service and dedication to promoting wellness and safety among women, children, adolescents and families.

The 27th annual MCH Networking and Alumni Award Reception honored Krishna Upadhya (SPH’98), vice president of quality care and health equity at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Cherrie Lynn Evans (SPH’09), senior principal technical advisor for maternal, newborn and child health at Jhpiego. Both visited SPH on April 28 to receive the awards and speak to SPH faculty, staff, and students.

“[The award reception] just gave me an opportunity to reflect on all the things that I’ve done in my career since being at BU, and that was really meaningful, particularly at that moment,” says Upadhya, who graduated from the MPH program at SPH, went on to earn an MD at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and completed a residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in adolescent medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

“[Recently], I was able to testify on behalf of Planned Parenthood to the FDA advisory committee that’s considering the over-the-counter birth control pill. The advisory committee then unanimously recommended to the FDA that they make that pill available over the counter for people of all ages,” says Upadhya, who has worked with the Free the Pill coalition since 2012, and recently became active in the Youth Reproductive Equity coalition as part of a task force developing a roadmap for research into the impacts of recent abortion restrictions on adolescents. “The advisory committee was a big step—hearing from all the young people and the adolescent health experts and being able to speak about the work that I have done in that forum was really gratifying.”

A commitment to maternal and child health runs in the family; Upadhya’s father trained as an obstetrician in India and treated patients in Ghana and England before immigrating to the United States. Upadhya says she got her own start during her undergrad at Duke University as a member of the North Carolina Student Rural Health Coalition.

“I’ve always had an interest in those types of policies that kind of demonize or marginalize certain groups,” says Upadhya. She recalls that in one of her first classes at SPH, she wrote a testimony advocating against a policy that required low-income women use contraceptives to qualify for welfare benefits.

“[Upadhya] was one of the earliest students to receive an MPH in Maternal and Child Health at BUSPH. As it turns out, her experience was a springboard for her dedication to adolescents as a physician, researcher, and policy-activist over the last 25 years,” says Lois McCloskey, clinical professor and associate chair of community health sciences, director of MCH CoE, and co-director of the MCH certificate. “[Upadhya] stepped up to serve as VP of Quality Care and Health Equity at Planned Parenthood at a moment when reproductive health equity and justice could not be more critical. What a perfect time to recognize her longstanding contributions.”

“I can picture in my mind a lot of different patients I’ve seen, a lot of different young people facing different circumstances,” says Upadhya, “and those individual encounters really give purpose to wanting to change larger systems.”

Like Upadhya, Evans also has a clinical background, practicing as a nurse and midwife for over 15 years. She too says the call to public health was reinforced by her clinical experiences.

During midwifery school at the University of Pennsylvania, Evans distinctly remembers listening in shock to her program director’s stories of women she witnessed die in childbirth while she was traveling abroad with the International Confederation of Midwives. The magnitude of maternal mortality in developing countries was “mind-blowing” to Evans, a mother of young children herself at the time. She chose to practice domestically while her children were growing up, but international health was always in the back of her mind, she says.

In 2004, Evans was working at a hospital in Frederick, Md., frequently delivering babies to immigrant women who had never accessed prenatal care. Without any training in program development or implementation, she took the initiative to put together a series of monthly prenatal clinics, providing newcomers with screenings, vitamins, and other much-needed services. The experience solidified her future in public health and with her children all headed off to college, she moved to Boston to join SPH’s first class of DrPH students.

Since graduating from SPH in 2009, Evans has risen the ranks from consultant to senior principal technical advisor at Jhpiego (pronounced “ja-pie-go”), an international non-profit health organization affiliated with Johns Hopkins University. Integrating her experiences as a midwife with her doctoral training in public health, she supports the implementation of maternal and infant survival programs across the more than 35 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East where Jhpiego has offices and partners.

“I know what it’s like to be like on the ground doing the work,” says Evans of her midwifery experience, “and that makes a great bridge when you’re designing research, implementing programs, or helping ministries of health translate World Health Organization guidance. So having both [clinical and public health] skills is really good, and I think my time at BU really helped pull all of that together.”

“Gene Declercq and I remember well the complex dissertation project [Evans] undertook in India. The field work was intense and her ability to adapt her skills in a brand-new context impressive. She entered the DrPH program already a highly experienced nurse-midwife, eager to deepen her impact globally—and wow, did she achieve her goal,” says McCloskey. “We are proud to honor her in this small way and to remember the great time we had teaching and learning from her.”