Mimi Niles
Midwife, Researcher, & Educator
Dr. Niles grew up in Queens, New York and began her career as a high school educator before finding nurse midwifery in her twenties. While her mother was a midwife in India, she did not know midwifery was available as a career path in the United States due to lack of midwifery visibility within the American culture and healthcare system at large. After completing an accelerated nursing program, she was deliberate in the role and setting she sought following graduation.
“Everyone kept telling me you have to do med-surg…and all the time I was plotting ways not to do med-surg. I had a specific interest in out-of-hospital births and I knew I needed experience outside of the hospital.”
Dr. Niles’ first nursing role was with the Visiting Nurse Service where she was able to take part of a public health program during her visiting nurse tenure and went on to complete her Master’s of Nursing Midwifery as well as a Mater’s of Public Health in Global Health Leadership. For the last decade, she has provided full scope midwifery care in a collaborative practice setting at Woodhull Medical Center in Brooklyn, where midwives attend 90% of all births while demonstrating stellar maternity care outcomes.
Dr. Niles completed her PhD at New York University in 2019 followed by postdoctoral training under the mentorship of Dr. Saraswathi Vedam and Dr. Kathrin Stoll, at the Birth Place Lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, a leader in community based participatory collaborative research. Her work explores the potential of integrated models of midwifery care in creating health equity in historically disenfranchised communities with complex care needs. She is extensively trained in utilizing critical feminist theory, as theorized by Black and brown feminist scholars, and using qualitative research methods to generate policy and programming rooted in intersectionality and anti-racist frameworks. As a researcher, she hopes to generate midwifery knowledge as a tool to build equity and liberation for marginalized and minoritized people. Her research thus far can be found here.
“My goal is to make care for women and children-bearing people more safe, more loving, more just…Ensuring high quality maternity care is my goal…I really want to bring care back into the hands of people and the community. I don’t want care to be trapped in hospitals, owned by physicians, owned by insurance companies, or owned by corporations….I hope we become an inclusive profession and sincerely hope we become warriors for justice in our work…It’s really time to democratize and liberate healthcare and abolish these old systems and it’s going to take nurses to do that.”
Dr. Niles has received various awards including the Johnson & Johnson Minority Faculty Award and the Jonas Nurse Leaders Scholar Award. Dr. Niles now serves on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives. She is currently an Assistant Professor at New York University. Her most rewarding work to date is as the mother of her two glorious children, born at home with midwives.
Watch Dr. Niles’ Nurses You Should Know Video here.
Further Reading
Learn about Birth Equity here.
Learn about the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives here.
Learn about nursing education in India here.
To support Asian Americans for Equality, click here.
Sources
The information above was sourced from Dr. Niles, LinkedIn, and NYU.
Learn More
To learn more about inclusion in nursing and be part of the national discussion to address racism in nursing, check out and share the following resources:
Know Your History
- Nursing CLIO to engage with historians and scholars committed to deep work around historical accuracy in healthcare and nursing.
- American Association for the History of Nursing to attend monthly webinars on topics of nursing history, view the calendar here.
Examine Bias
- NurseManifest to attend live zoom sessions with fellow nurses on nursing’s overdue reckoning on racism or to sign their pledge.
- Breaking Bias in Healthcare, an online course created by scientist Anu Gupta, to learn how bias is related to our brain’s neurobiology and can be mitigated with mindfulness.
- Revolutionary Love Learning Hub provides free tools for learners and educators to use love as fuel towards ourselves, our opponents, and to others so that we can embody a world where we see no strangers.
Support & Advocate
- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
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