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Camille Collins Lovell, a community health education doctoral student in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, has been selected as a 2024 Emerging Scholar in Family Planning and grant recipient from the Society of Family Planning (SFP), an international nonprofit professional organization specializing in abortion and contraception science.

Established in 2005, SFP comprises physicians, nurses, sociologists, public health practitioners and trainees and aims to help trainees establish a family planning research portfolio and develop the next generation of community researchers. The $7,500 grant award will further Collins Lovell’s dissertation research on the reproductive experiences and family-making practices of migrant dairy workers.

Working under the supervision of community health education professor Aline Gubrium, Collins Lovell’s research explores the reproductive experiences of undocumented Latina dairy farmworkers, including the geographic, economic, legal and other constraints they encounter in accessing contraceptive methods, abortion and maternal health care in rural Vermont.

Using an ethnographic approach, she hopes to understand family-making practices in the wider context of transnational family dynamics, women’s labor, and immigration policy. Her research applies the tenets of reproductive justice and hopes to contribute to the movement for the health and rights of undocumented immigrant families in the United States.

Collins Lovell holds an MPH from Tulane University. She was a fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Center for Global Health and worked internationally for 20 years on sexual and reproductive health and rights, including maternal health, HIV prevention and treatment, contraceptive access, safe abortion and adolescent sexual health throughout Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.