Mimi Niles

Mimi (Paulomi) Niles, PhD, MPH, CNM, is Assistant Professor at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing. She is a theorist, educator, researcher, and certified nurse-midwife. Her work explores the potential of integrated models of midwifery care in creating health equity in historically disenfranchised communities. She is trained in utilizing critical feminist theory, as theorized by Black and brown feminist scholars, and qualitative research methods as a means to implement policy and programming rooted in critical feminist and anti-oppression frameworks. As a researcher, she hopes to generate midwifery knowledge as a tool to build equity and liberation for marginalized and minoritized people and grow the profession of midwifery.

For the last decade, Prof. Niles has been a practicing midwife, serving childbearing women and families, within the largest public health network in the nation. She continues to provide clinical care as a full-scope midwife working in a collaborative midwife-physician practice setting, within the largest municipal hospital system in the nation, NYC Health + Hospitals. 

Prof. Niles is an active member of the midwifery community locally, nationally, and globally. She was recently appointed to serve as a member of the Americas Regional Committee of the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) as a research expert.  Locally, she serves on the New York City Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee and is an active member of the Brooklyn Borough President Maternal Health Taskforce Midwifery Committee.  She has received various awards including the Johnson & Johnson Minority Faculty Award and the Jonas Nurse Leaders Scholar Award. Niles was the first certified nurse-midwife to sit on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives (NACPM). She earned her PhD in Nursing Theory, her M.P.H in Global Health Leadership and holds a BA in Comparative Literature and English Education. She received postdoctoral training under the mentorship of Dr. Saraswathi Vedam, at the Birth Place Lab at the University of British Columbia – Vancouver, a leader in community-based participatory collaborative research on respectful maternity care. She was a Provost postdoctoral fellow at NYU under the mentorship of Dr. Audrey Lyndon - a nationally recognized qualitative researcher and leader on quality and safety in maternity care. She grew up as a first-generation immigrant in Queens, NY, is mothers to two young adults, and honors her mother’s legacy as a nurse-midwife in India.