Program Leadership and Staff
Linda S. Franck, RN, PhD, FAAN
PI/Co-Director
Professor Linda S. Franck joined ACTIONS Founding Director, Dr. Monica McLemore, as Co-Director for the ACTIONS program in 2020. She holds the Jack and Elaine Koehn Endowed Chair in Pediatric Nursing at the UCSF School of Nursing; holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences; and is an affiliate member of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. From 2015-2020 she served as Co-Principal Investigator and Director of Postnatal Research for the California Preterm Birth Initiative. In 2022 she launched the first family-centered care research center, a partnership between Ronald McDonald House Charities and UCSF.
Dr. Franck has extensive experience in leading interdisciplinary teams to conduct clinical research to improve the quality and safety of hospital care for infants and children. She has a particular interest in improving the patient and family experience of health care and has pioneered interventions to engage patients, families and communities in healthcare delivery and research co-design. Dr. Franck received her bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of San Francisco and her master’s and PhD degrees from UCSF. She rejoined the UCSF faculty in 2010, after a decade at the Institute of Child Health, University College London, where she served as the first Chair of Children’s Nursing Research in the UK. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and of the American Academy of Nursing. In 2020, she was inducted into the Sigma Nursing Researcher Hall of Fame and named the UCSF School of Nursing Research Mentor of the Year.
Nikia Grayson, DNP, MSN, MPH, MA, CNM, FNP-C
Co-Director
Dr. Nikia Grayson, DNP, MSN, MPH, MA, CNM, FNP-C (she/her/hers) is a Reproductive Justice informed public health activist, anthropologist and family nurse-midwife who has devoted her life to serving and empowering people in underserved communities.
Nikia graduated from Howard University with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in communications and public health respectively, from University of Memphis with a master’s in medical anthropology and from the University of Tennessee with a master’s in nursing and a doctorate in nurse practice. She completed her post-master’s certificate in midwifery at Frontier Nursing University.
Nikia has more than 15 years experience working in public health and nursing, with her more recent work focusing on reproductive rights and justice, birth justice, and midwifery. Nikia has a deep love for midwifery and growing the workforce of midwives and birth workers of colors in the south. She is passionate about being a disruptor to the current healthcare system and creating new models of care that integrate midwifery and center Black and brown communities. She works daily to ensure all persons have the rights and means to make decisions regarding their sexual and reproductive health.
Nikia is the Chief Clinical Officer at CHOICES Memphis Center for Reproductive Health, where they have opened the first non-profit comprehensive reproductive health care center in the country and the first birth center in the city. In 2024, she joined the faculty at UCSF School of Nursing as an Associate Professor and Specialty Co-Coordinator of the Certified Nurse Midwifery Program. She is also a member of the Board of Directors for SisterReach, the only Reproductive Justice organization in Tennessee.
Jennifer James, PhD, MSW, MSSP
Co-Director
Jennifer James is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Health and Aging, the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the Bioethics program at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. James is a qualitative researcher and Black Feminist scholar whose research lies at the intersection of race, gender and health, with a specific focus on experiences of cancer and chronic illness. She uses community engaged research and an intersectional framework to explore ethical issues related to experiences of illness, patient-provider relationships, and resistance and resilience in biomedicine. Dr. James received postdoctoral training in Bioethics at UCSF while serving as the project director for an NCI-funded R01 grant, focused on how patients understand genomic risk for breast cancer and make breast cancer screening decisions.
Her current work is focused on patient-provider relationships and shared decision-making in carceral settings. Across several research projects, her work centers the voices and experiences of people incarcerated in prisons and jails to better understand women’s health and aging behind bars. Dr. James holds a PhD in Sociology from UCSF, a Master’s of Social Work and a Master’s of Science in Social Policy from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Yale University.
Monica McLemore, PhD, MPH, RN
Founding Director
Dr. Monica R. McLemore is a tenured professor in the Child, Family, and Population Health Department at the University of Washington School of Nursing. Prior to her arrival at UW, she was a tenured associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco and was named the Thelma Shobe Endowed Chair in 2021. She retired from clinical practice as a public health and staff nurse after a 28-year clinical nursing career in 2019, however, continues to provide flu and COVID-19 vaccines.
Her program of research is focused on understanding reproductive health and justice. To date, she has 93 peer reviewed articles, OpEds and commentaries and her research has been cited in the Huffington Post, Lavender Health, five amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States, and three National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine reports, and a data visualization project entitled How To Fix Maternal Mortality: The first step is to stop blaming women that was published in the 2019 Future of Medicine edition of Scientific American.
Her work has also appeared in publications such as Dame Magazine, Politico, ProPublica/NPR and she made a voice appearance in Terrance Nance’s HBO series Random Acts of Flyness. She is the recipient of numerous awards and currently serves as chair for Sexual and Reproductive Health section of the American Public Health Association. She was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2019. She became the Editor in Chief of Health Equity Journal in 2022.
Nikki Lanshaw, MPH
Senior Program Director
Nikki Lanshaw (she/her) is a public health program director, researcher, and advocate based in the Eastern Sierra. She is currently a Senior Program Director at University of California San Francisco, where she manages the Abortion Care Training Incubator for Outstanding Nurse Scholars program and Reproductive Health Service Corps-funded initiatives. Her professional interests include reproductive health workforce development, nursing and midwifery education, health care reform, the operationalization of reproductive justice theory, and expanding access to sexual and reproductive health care in rural areas. Previously, she has served on the board of Eastern Sierra Pride and ACCESS Reproductive Justice and served as the Policy Chair of the Sexual and Reproductive Health Section of the American Public Health Association. Nikki received an MPH from UC Berkeley in 2019.
Sarah McCoy-Harms, MA
Project Coordinator, RHSC Evaluation
Sarah McCoy-Harms, MA (she/her) brings over a decade of experience focused on issues related to reproductive health care, gender-based violence and health equity. She has worked with a variety of partners across the social sector, in higher education, health care, and government to build more equitable programs, processes and research projects. She looks forward to supporting the ACTIONS and Reproductive Health Services Corps teams, especially with regard to operational and evaluation efforts. Sarah enjoys gardening, sunsets and being in or near bodies of water.