Transdisciplinary Science and Practice in Action: The Maternal and Child Health Journal as Shared Space

Abstract

More than 20 years ago, I was in my first ‘‘real’’ public health job—as a maternal and child health epidemiologist (from New York) with the Bureau of Public Health (in West Virginia). Fresh from my epidemiology training and still working on my PhD (and with my wife pregnant with our second child), I was motivated by the clear importance of the maternal-fetal period in the short-term on immediate health outcomes, and in the long-term on lasting health and well-being. Deeply inspired by the writings of ecologist Rene Dubos (e.g. ‘‘think globally, act locally’’) during my training, I felt—and feel—that the future of civilization depended, at its core, upon healthy pregnancy, safe birth, and nurturing childhoods. But, despite my intellectual appreciation for human reproduction and the future of the world, the task before me at the West Virginia Bureau of Public Health was to deconstruct some confusing adolescent pregnancy vital statistics in the context of age-specific fertility rates. I ended up calling (in an era before universal email!) the HHS Region III Perinatal Information Consortium at Johns Hopkins University and spoke with a director there about how to approach the problem. The director was Dr. Donna Petersen, who subsequently connected me to other resources and people and my envelopment into the network of maternal and child health officially began. To me, this anecdote is substantial and emblematic of the broad, far-reaching field of maternal and child health. That professional network of MCH workers and scientists impressed me with both its substance and efficiency—and I quickly and routinely encountered highly accomplished academics, practitioners, and officials—many of whom serve on our Editorial Board—and so, so many others who helped me think through practical problems and who tolerated my own ideas and thoughts on grants to fund, papers to accept, and themes for conferences. I remember well the first meeting of a few MCH epidemiologists and MCH directors that Roger Rochat held at his home in the early 1990s—that small gathering of a dozen or so people mushroomed into the annual Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology Conference that now attracts many from all over the world. Maternal and child health professionals were driven, hard-working, smart, insightful, compassionate people—technically sophisticated but networked through human relationships and old-fashioned collaboration. And they were everywhere—in states, localities, universities, government agencies—all struggling with resistant ethnic disparities in outcomes, insufficiently measured phenomena, quality challenges inherent to data sets, statistics that sometimes poorly met the needs of our populations, programs with great ideas but with inconclusive and uncertain benefits, facing strong political pressures, stigma, and fundamental questions about rights. Maternal and child health was then, and is now, profoundly inclusive of many disciplines, cultures, methods, and constituents from affected populations to government officials to finely specialized scientists and practitioners. What other field can claim such a diverse scope of interconnected issues involving so many disciplines, paradigms, and people? Choosing to work in maternal and child health is daunting, and humbling. Dr. Milt Kotelchuck and his colleagues’ founding vision for the Maternal and Child Health Journal was bold and risky. Disciplinary purists—which comprise much of science—would find crossing boundaries unpleasant, T. De Ver Dye (&) Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Women’s Health, University of Hawai’i, John A. Burns School of Medicine, 1319 Punahou St., Suite 824, Honolulu, HI 96826, USA e-mail: dyet@hawaii.edu