In January 2025, Dr. Monica R. McLemore joined the NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing as a visiting professor. Prior to that, she was a tenured professor in the Child, Family, and Population Health Department and the Director for the Manning-Price Spratlan Center for Anti-Racism and Equity (CARE) in Nursing at the University of Washington School of Nursing. She will remain affiliate faculty at UW. McLemore worked as a public health and staff nurse for 28 years before she retired from clinical practice in 2019.

She has worked her entire career in reproductive health, rights, and justice.  She is a preeminent scholar of antiracist birth equity research, community-informed methods, and policy translation. Her program of research is focused on understanding reproductive health and justice. To date, she has 143 peer reviewed articles, op-eds and commentaries and her research has been cited in the Huffington Post, Lavender Health, six amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, and four reports for the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Her work has also appeared in publications such as Dame Magazine, Politico, ProPublica/NPR and she made a voice appearance in Terrance Nance’s HBO series Random Acts of Flyness.

McLemore also appears in the documentary, “Everybody’s Work: Healing What Hurts Us All,” which looks at nurses’ role in health equity.  In 2022, she became the Editor in Chief of Health Equity Journal.

McLemore earned a master’s in public health from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in oncology genomics at the University of California, San Francisco. 

She was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2019.