Healthy Baby Summit

Kimberly is an award winning journalist, five-time author, international speaker, femtech founder and advocate for maternal and infant health. A former senior editor at ESSENCE and writer at FORTUNE magazine, Kimberly is a leading voice on the socio-cultural and racial complexities of birth, breastfeeding and motherhood. Kimberly leveraged her decades of experience as a business journalist, her passion for mothering and her vision for using technology to amplify community voices to create the Irth (as in Birth, but we dropped the B for bias) app. She is also the creator and co-founder of Black Breastfeeding Week, an annual awareness week that has grown to international recognition and executive director of Narrative Nation, Inc. a non-profit that co-creates culturally relevant media and technology to eliminate health disparities.

A frequent contributor to The New York Times and Washington Post, HuffPost, Slate and others, her online commentaries received over 10 million page views last year. Kimberly’s fifth book, The Big Let Down—How Medicine, Big Business and Feminism Undermine Breastfeeding was published by St. Martin’s Press in January 2017. In 2018, Kimberly was named one of “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s eNews for her media advocacy work for mothers and children.

She most recently served as editorial director of the Maternal and Child Health Communication Collective, a national consortium of over 8О organizations, working to shift the narrative of maternal and infant health, funded by the W.K Kellogg Foundation. Kimberly is also the former editorial director of The Black Maternal Health Project of Women’s eNews.

Kimberly roots her advocacy and thought leadership work in rich, on-the-ground experience. For nearly a decade, she has created and directed innovative community-led projects in New Orleans, Birmingham, Detroit and Philadelphia that explore the impact of “first food deserts”-communities that lack accessible resources to support mothers to breastfeed-and designed community-partnered strategies to transform these areas into more breastfeeding supportive environments.

Kimberly’s work speaking to and for women of color includes The Mocha Manual series of books, published by HarperCollins and MochaManual.com, an award-winning pregnancy and parenting destination for Black parents. Her first book, The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy was nominated for a NAACP Image Award and turned into a DVD sold at Wal-mart. The Mocha Manual to Turning Your Passion into Profit and The Mocha Manual to Military Life round out the top-selling series.

Kimberly has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, Anderson Cooper, the Tom Joyner Morning Show, Fox News and has been featured in various international and national media outlets, including the British Medical Journal, The Guardian (U.K.), Essence, NY Family, Yahoo News and in various online media.

Kimberly is a graduate of New York University and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A divorced mother of two, she lives in Queens, NY.

Session: The Restoration Project and Maternal Mortality

Dr. Rosalba Ruiz Reyes is a public health advocate and founding member of the Binational Breastfeeding Coalition and the Empowerment Congress. She began her career working in diabetes prevention but shifted her focus to lactation after recognizing a critical need in border communities. Surprised by the stigma she encountered as a breastfeeding mother, Dr. Ruiz Reyes investigated local trends and discovered alarmingly low breastfeeding rates along the U.S.–Mexico border. In response, she founded the Binational Breastfeeding Coalition in 2012—a collective of breastfeeding and public health professionals united under the mission that “all children born along the U.S.–Mexico Border should have an equal opportunity to be breastfed.” Her work continues to advance health equity and empower families across border regions through culturally informed education and advocacy.

Session: A Breastfeeding Journey Along the US-Mexico Border: The Binational Breastfeeding Coalition

Dr. Matthew Olm is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder whose research centers on the infant microbiome and its role in health and disease. He earned his Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of California Berkeley and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Olm’s work has advanced understanding of how industrialization alters the infant gut microbiome, its links to diseases such as necrotizing enterocolitis, and the role of breast milk antibodies in guiding healthy microbial development.

Session: Breast Milk, the Infant Gut Microbiome, and Emerging Clinical Insights

Dr. Andrea Nied, PT, DPT has been a Doctor of Physical Therapy in Colorado since 2011, when she moved to Arvada immediately after finishing physical therapy school. Dr. Andrea has extensive experience working with all orthopedic conditions and pelvic floor health for women and men.

Dr. Andrea has two children which ignited her passion for pelvic floor health after she experienced her own postpartum issues in 2016. Clinically, she has been certified in advanced techniques such as dry needling and visceral mobilization to help treat her patients struggling with pelvic floor issues.

In 2022, Dr. Andrea opened Movement Physio and Wellness, the premier pelvic floor physical therapy clinic in Arvada, where her team of pelvic floor therapists treat bladder leakage, pelvic and back pain, pregnancy related pain and postpartum issues related to the pelvic floor. Her team helps you get rid of annoying pain and embarrassing leakage, so you can get back to your workouts and Colorado activities you love!

Dr. Andrea loves speaking to the community about pelvic floor health to build awareness and normalize that the issues can be treated. You are not broken!

Session: Stronger Together: Integrating Pelvic Health into Postpartum and Lactation Support

Rebecca Heinrich, CLC, is the Director of Mothers’ Milk Bank at RMCHF. She has been with the milk bank since 2015, after a career spent in organ and tissue transplantation. She currently co-chairs the Equity Committee for the Human Milk Banking Association of North America. In her free time, Rebecca loves to sew—she has sewn everything from clothing and home décor to costumes for RuPaul’s Drag Race!

Session: Why Choose Pasteurized Donor Human Milk