Prof. Ann-Marie Widstrom

Ann-Marie Widstrom is an Associate Professor at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. She has been a labour ward staff midwife, a lecturer at the Midwifery School in Stockholm,and head of the Department of Nursing including Midwifery Education at Stockholm University College of Health Sciences. She was co-project leader for developing interdisciplinary Centres for Clinical Education at four major hospitals in Stockholm during the merging of the University College and Karolinska Institutet.

She has supervised several doctoral candidates at the Karolinska Institutet and published some 50 research articles. Her main research area is the inborn behavior of the newborn infant to find the mother’s breast when held skin-to-skin by the mother immediately after birth. Recently she published a paper on the infant’s inborn sequence of nine developmental stages of importance for breastfeeding and maternal-infant interaction. Work has started to put these findings into clinical practice. In collaboration with colleagues at the USA organization Healthy Children Project and colleagues in Sweden, DVDs have been produced to show staff and parents the benefits and joys with mother-infant uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact the first hours after birth. Ann-Marie is also involved in working with teams to apply skin-to-skin under different cultural circumstances in Egypt as well as in USA.

Catherine Watson Genna

Catherine Watson Genna has been an IBCLC in private practice in NYC since 1992. She has a special interest in the anatomical, genetic and neurological influences on infant sucking skills, and writes and speaks on these topics. She is co-researcher in a study utilizing ultrasound to examine tongue movements during breastfeeding in infants with ankyloglossia and other sucking problems. Her clinical photographs have been published in both lay and scholarly venues. She is the author of Supporting Sucking Skills in Breastfeeding Infants (Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2008) and Selecting and Using Breastfeeding Tools (Hale Publishing, 2009).

Sheela R Geraghty

Sheela R. Geraghty, MD, MS, IBCLC is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati and is the medical director of the Cincinnati Children’s Center for Breastfeeding Medicine. In addition to her general pediatric practice, Dr. Geraghty oversees three Breastfeeding Medicine Clinic locations and sees breastfeeding mother-child dyads two days a week. Dr. Geraghty does “hands on” breastfeeding teaching with medical students and doctors in trainings and serves as a clinical resource for regional health care providers. Dr. Geraghty helped found the Cincinnati Children’s Research Human Milk Bank and created the Cincinnati Children’s Milk Donor Depot program. Dr. Geraghty’s research program has always focused on the barriers to successful breastfeeding outcomes. Dr. Geraghty’s current focus is on the prevalent practice of breast milk pumping and the potential implications on mothers and infants related to this practice, including milk sharing.