Birgitta Essén is Professor in International Maternal and Reproductive Health at
Uppsala University , Sweden. She is a Senior Consultant in Obstetric and
Gynaecology at the University Hospital of Uppsala where she is running a clinic
especially for immigrant women. Her research profile is related to sexual and
reproductive health in a globalized society with special focus on perinatal and
maternal mortality, female genital cutting, and honour violence. She has extensive
research and field work experiences from both low-resource countries as well as
multi-cultural settings in Europe and she has supervised more than 20 PhD students,
half of them with research in Africa.
Professor Essén and her team have research in Latin Amerika (Nicaragua, Bolivia).
Sri Lanka, India, the Middle East (Iran and Irak), in African context (Somalia,
Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia) and in relation to the diaspora
community in Europe.
For more than two decades she has had a research collaboration with
anthropologists where they have translate theoretical knowledge of anthropology– as
social & cultural aspects of reproductive phenomena –and then made it applicable in
reproductive health promotions or in maternity care.
In 2018 she was awarded by the Royal Society of Arts and Science of Uppsala
(Academia Regia Scientiarum Upsaliensis) for her outstanding interdisciplinary
research work on migrant women's reproductive health with the aim of demonstrating
conflict of values and changing clinical practice.
