Rivera-Núñez to lead programs on maternal and child health 9/11/2015 Faculty; Public Health Share this Story: Zorimar Rivera-Núñez, assistant professor, has received a grant from Washington University’s Ferguson Academic Seed Grant Program to enhance the Brown School’s curriculum on maternal and child health. The grant will help support Maternal Health Month in October, which will feature a variety of panels and speakers. The presentations include an Oct. 20 event in which leading experts from USAID and Iris Group will discuss gender equality in the context of global maternal child health and adverse pregnancy outcomes. Another panel on Oct. 28, Inequalities in STL Birth Outcomes, will feature leaders from the Missouri Foundation for Health to discuss Flourish, a new program to improve infant mortality in our area. The presentations will be paired with a course that Rivera-Núñez and Jessica Levy, Brown School invited scholar, teach, called Pregnancy Outcomes: Biological, Social and Environmental Determinants. “I want to call attention to the importance of healthy pregnancy and to disparities in the St. Louis area,” Rivera-Núñez says. “Some ZIP codes have infant mortality rates similar to rates in developing countries.” She said that eventually she hopes to create a concentration in child and maternal health as part of the Masters of Public Health program at Brown.