Sahana Narayan, MS, MSPH is a maternal health researcher and doctoral student at the University of Oxford, where she is pursuing a fully funded DPhil (PhD) in Women’s and Reproductive Health through the Medical Research Council (MRC) Doctoral Training Programme—one of the UK’s most competitive and prestigious biomedical fellowships. She is the sole MRC-funded student in her department and one of only 12 selected across Oxford’s Medical Sciences Division.

Sahana’s research seeks to improve intrapartum care and advance maternal health equity by examining how risk is communicated, negotiated, and acted upon in ways that shape autonomy and decision-making during childbirth, with the ultimate goal of reducing adverse outcomes such as fetal hypoxia, stillbirth, postpartum hemorrhage, eclampsia, sepsis, and maternal mortality. A central thread in her work is the study of obstetric violence as a systemic phenomenon—one that reflects structural inequities, perpetuates epistemic injustice by devaluing the knowledge and experiences of birthing people, and exposes persistent gaps in respectful, person-centered maternity care. She aims to address these issues through doctoral research that integrates clinical innovation with critical inquiry into how power, bias, and data systems shape obstetric decision-making.

Her work builds on a foundation of rigorous public health training, having earned dual master’s degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University, where she specialized in bioethics, scientific communication, social medicine, public health, and reproductive health policy. Her research at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital continues to foreground the voices of those most affected by systemic failures in maternal and reproductive care—across Uganda, Cameroon, Ukraine, the United States, and the United Kingdom—ensuring their needs remain central to both scholarship and practice. She has published in BMC Reproductive Health, Reproductive Medicine, and JOJ Nursing and Health Care on topics ranging from standardizing postpartum blood pressure monitoring to qualitative studies examining provider perspectives on barriers to respectful maternity care in both community contexts and major academic hospitals. Guided by the belief that public health must interrogate bias and build capacity, Sahana approaches women’s health with the recognition that maternal health disparities stem not only from biological risk but also from systemic inequities and the silencing of patient voices in reproductive care. Sahana is dedicated to forging a career as a physician-scientist at the nexus of maternal health, public health, and health services research, building a body of work that not only advances scientific discovery but also drives policy, strengthens equity across diverse health systems, and catalyzes community-centered innovation to transform how reproductive care is delivered, experienced, and valued worldwide.