By Marie Harvey
Susannah Gibbs has been selected as the recipient of the 2020 Outstanding Young Professional Award sponsored by the Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) Section of the American Public Health Association (APHA). This award honors individuals who deserve recognition early in their careers because of their professional accomplishments, initiative and dedication to the field of sexual and reproductive health.
Susannah completed her PhD in the Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins University in 2017 with a focus on reproductive epidemiology. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow, funded by a National Research Service Award (NRSA) F32 grant, in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University, where she is conducting research on Oregon’s policy that allows pharmacists to directly prescribe hormonal contraception. Results from this study have recently been published in Contraception and will be presented at the 2020 APHA meeting. She has also recently worked on studies examining the effect of Medicaid expansion on preventive reproductive health services, abortion services, prenatal care and neonatal outcomes in Oregon.
In addition to her research accomplishments, she has demonstrated initiative and dedication to the field through significant service, leadership, and mentoring activities. She recently collaborated with several faculty at Oregon State to launch a Sexual and Reproductive Health Equity Consortium that will foster sexual and reproductive health research and support the development of community partnerships.
Since 2018 she has served as a founding board member and is currently the president of the board of Thrive Afya Tanzania, a non-profit organization that works to improve access to quality reproductive and maternal health services in Tanzania. She has sought out additional opportunities for mentoring outside of the Oregon State community through the Cientifico Latino Graduate School Mentorship Initiative, which aims to prepare underrepresented students to navigate the STEM graduate school application process.