Harvard honors Kozhimannil for her work in rural and maternal and child health policy - School of Public Health

On May 23, 2022, Harvard Medical School’s Department of Population Medicine awarded U of M School of Public Health (SPH) Professor Katy Backes Kozhimannil its Aaka Pande and Sumit Majumdar Memorial Award for her work in advancing policy, practice, and systems in the areas of rural health and maternal and child health. Kozhimannil, an alum of the Department of Population Medicine’s fellowship program, has a track record of providing critical evidence for important state and federal policy changes.

Katy Kozhimannil smiling. — Distinguished McKnight University Professor Katy Backes Kozhimannil

The award is named in honor of two researchers who devoted their work in health policy to making the world a better place. The award recognizes outstanding researchers who are making significant contributions to constructive health policy dialogue through papers, blogs, or op-eds. The paper that Kozhimannil’s nominator submitted was a Journal of the American Medical Association commentary co-written with SPH Associate Professor Carrie Henning-Smith on four key issues that federal officials need to address in order to significantly improve the health of rural residents.

The Harvard award is particularly meaningful to Kozhimannil because she knew both Aaka Pande and Sumit Majumdar.

“I met Aaka as soon as she began the PhD program in health policy at Harvard and I got to know her extremely well — she was an extraordinary emerging leader in global health,” says Kozhimannil. “Sumit was someone I looked up to — he was brilliant. His ‘Unhealthy Health Policy Research’ article is one I teach my students now. And I am grateful to have crossed paths professionally with both of them, and I am hopeful that I may carry a piece of their kindness and genius in my work and in my life.”

On the federal level, the impact of Kozhimannil’s work is exceptional. On December 7, 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris declared the first ever White House Maternal Health Day of Action. In making this announcement, she directly referenced Kozhimannil’s research on inequities in maternal health, especially racial and geographic disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality. On March 11, 2022, the U.S. Senate passed the bipartisan Rural Maternal and Obstetric Modernization of Services (MOMS) Act. Kozhimannil started working with the Senate Rural Health Caucus in 2016 on developing this legislation, and her research was a driving force behind this bill.

On the state level, Kozhimannil’s research was the first to document the cost-saving benefits of continuous labor support (doulas) to Minnesota Medicaid programs. Findings from her research resulted in the passage of Minnesota Statutes Chapter 108, Sec. 11, which authorized Medicaid to reimburse doula services, and has also led to laws in several other states and proposed state and federal legislation to increase access to doula care. More recently, Kozhimannil’s research documented non-medical opioid use during pregnancy and assessed the effects of state policies on substance use disorder treatment for people who give birth.

Kozhimannil is a UMN Distinguished McKnight University Professor and director of the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center. In 2020, she worked with Henning-Smith to establish the Rural Health Program with the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

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