POWER
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When Claribel Crews, MEd, a Providence school counselor, was first asked to join a panel of community members to advise a Women & Infants Hospital researcher’ s project about cesarean sections,“ I was like, mmmm, no,” she recalls.
Crews has three children, ages 9, 6, and 2, all delivered by C-section— something she didn’ t share widely.“ There’ s such a taboo about having a C-section in certain places that I wasn’ t really sure that I wanted to, for lack of words, out myself,” she says. But then she found out what the researcher was studying, and Crews’ curiosity won out:“ An app for a C-section? What do you mean?” She signed up for the group.
The app was designed by Alexis Gimovsky, MD, a maternalfetal medicine specialist at Women & Infants, who says she intends it“ to decrease the number of cesareans.” It uses data from 200,000 women during childbirth to“ guide clinicians during the pushing phase of labor by offering real-time predictions about the likelihood of a safe vaginal delivery,
New community engagement efforts bridge the gap between scientists and the public.
BY PHOEBE HALL
versus the risk of an operative or cesarean birth,” she says.
Gimovsky had applied for grants to develop the app and study its effectiveness; grant reviewers suggested she involve patients as well as practitioners in her research. To do that well, Gimovsky says, she needed help from“ regular people,” not just academics or doctors. And she knew who could help her find them.
Advance Rhode Island Clinical and Translational Research is a federally funded hub of resources for scientists throughout the state. Among its many services, Advance RI-CTR helps organize focus group-type gatherings called Community Engagement Studios, where researchers present their projects and get actionable feedback from the people their work is intended to serve.
After Gimovsky, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Brown, was accepted for a studio, the Advance RI-CTR team gathered six local participants last
PHOTOGRAPH: ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS / ROWAN JORDAN
SPRING 2026 l HEALTH DISCOVERIES @ BROWN 21