A nurse who fell in love with the power of women's bodies and human milk science.

I didn't arrive at lactation work in a straight line.

In nursing school, my breastfeeding education was almost nonexistent: a slide or two, a few bullet points, and very little that reflected the realities on the floor. I kept meeting families whose needs went far beyond what I'd been taught, and I realized how wide the gap was between what parents were living and what most of us, as providers, were prepared to offer.

So I went looking for more. I pieced together online modules that often felt thin and disconnected from practice. I interned for free with IBCLCs just to get basic hands-on skills I could bring back to the mothers I was caring for: how to actually position a baby, how to read a latch with my eyes and my ears, how to support a parent who was exhausted and scared.

I became an IBCLC because mothers deserve more than well-meaning advice, and clinicians deserve more than trial-and-error learning at the bedside. That same gap is why I'm now pursuing a PhD focused on lactation science — to build the kind of rigorous, practice-grounded knowledge I wished I'd had as a new nurse, and to help move breastfeeding education beyond a few slides in a lecture.

Birthmilk is the home for that work, a place for parents and healthcare providers to find evidence-based information.