My early career research focused on pregnancy and childbirth in sub-Saharan Africa. Through the PartoMa Project, I sought to understand how care is delivered within broader contextual influences and to co-create interventions with women, healthcare professionals, and health system leaders. My work highlights how involving underserved and marginalized groups in participatory research can challenge dominant views and adapt interventions to their lived realities — striving to provide the best possible care within resource-limited settings, while advocating for broader systemic changes to address underlying inequities and create sustainable improvements.

While I continue to lead the expanding PartoMa Project in Tanzania and Ethiopia, my research has broadened to a more global focus on reproductive health and rights. This includes exposing inequities in clinical guidelines and research evidence related to reproductive health, demonstrating how these disparities perpetuate both over- and under-medicalization across diverse contexts. 

I earned my MD in 2011 and PhD in 2019 from the University of Copenhagen. Currently, I divide my time between a 50% Associate Professorship in Global Reproductive Health and Rights at the University of Copenhagen, and a 50% clinical position as an obstetrician at Copenhagen University Hospital – Hvidovre. Clinically, my focus is particularly on advancing equity in reproductive health for ethnic minority women in Denmark. I am the founder and principal investigator of the PartoMa Project.

Featured publications: 

https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj-2023-076515

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(21)00059-0/fulltext

My teaching spans from clinical hands-on scenario training within obstetrics to broader introductions to global health and methodological courses on co-creation and complex intervention research. Particularly, I teach global Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights across multiple academic levels, including bachelor, master, PhD, and postgraduate programs. 

I am the course director for the University of Copenhagen’s Summer School in Global Health Challenges.