Changemakers in Family Planning: Sameera Nayak
Abortion
Awarded 2024
Changemakers in Family Planning
Sameera Nayak, PhD, MA
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
$80,233

Dr. Sameera S. Nayak (she/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Public Health at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her research sits at the intersection of migration, gender, and justice, and is informed by her lived experience as a South Asian immigrant to the US. The Changemakers in Family Planning grant will facilitate her career as a leader in expanding equitable abortion access for immigrants. Her short-term research goals are to examine how the legal landscape of immigration and abortion intersect to impact abortion access and care for immigrants, and to understand how immigrants with varying immigration statuses and racialized identities experience the embodiment of these policies over time. She seeks to pair this knowledge with her existing skills in health services delivery to design and test solutions that will enable structurally vulnerable immigrants to better access safe abortion care. Dr. Nayak holds a PhD in Population Health from Northeastern University. She completed her undergraduate degree at UCLA and her master’s degree at Columbia University. Her career development plan includes targeted training and mentoring in reproductive justice frameworks, legal epidemiology, grant proposal development and writing, primary data collection and research management, and working equitably with structurally vulnerable communities. Dr. Nayak envisions a career where she can contribute meaningfully to the policy discourse on reproductive health equity in order to advocate for the right to comprehensive abortion care for all immigrants.