Mehret recalls being drawn to Dara and Tamar from the very beginning, especially because of how persistently they pursued their passions.

“There were a lot of things that I was struck by with these two women,” said Mehret. “Dara was incredibly good at science. We had the same academic interests and were in a lot of classes together. And I remember Tamar embodied a lot of the creative—just an exceptional pianist, a wonderful writer. I met so many strong, talented, and interesting women at Ellis. These were my initial impressions, and they have sustained over time.”

The alumnae appreciated having each other’s support and looking to each other as role models during their time at Ellis, and even in the years since. Though much has changed since they were students, they say that their friends’ characters have been steadfast.

“We might be different people now,” Mehret said, “but the things I see in Dara and Tamar—who they are, their characters, how they show up in a room—that hasn’t changed. They’ve always stood out.”

“My first impressions of Dara and Mehret were lasting ones,” said Tamar. “I was really struck by how comfortable they were in their identities. If they believed in something or they wanted to see something happen, they would execute it—and flawlessly at that. Ellis’ motto is “to be rather than to seem,” and they are the epitome of that for me. They embody high integrity, achievement, and dedication—and it’s been that way since we were 14 years old.”

The strong relationship that the alumnae developed at Ellis formed the bedrock of their professional collaboration, as did the academic experience they had as Upper School students. All three women remember having an interest in specific aspects of science as teenagers: health and wellness for Dara, human behavior and reproductive health for Tamar, and medicine and the effects of lived experiences on health outcomes for Mehret. 

Their passions were nurtured by their Ellis science and STEM classes, and each alumna went on to pursue various science-related degrees at acclaimed higher education institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University, Spelman College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kenyon College, and the University of Pittsburgh. But the trio unanimously agree that it was actually the interdisciplinary aspect of their Ellis education that best prepared them for their future academic and career pursuits.

“I am a scientist,” said Tamar, “but I think I draw on my humanities, my writing, and my art skills just as much as my STEM skill set when I’m tackling a research problem. Even at Ellis it was all connected for me—we would be in ceramics class and I would be making fertility sculptures and thinking about lessons from AP bio!”

“The three of us have a very strong love of humanities,” agreed Mehret, who holds a B.A. in English Literature in addition to her degrees in Biology, Medicine, and Epidemiology. “We learned how to write at Ellis. We learned about societies, about international perspectives, about history. One of the transformative experiences that I had was co-teaching a mini-course with Dr. Greco during my senior year about slave literature and understanding the perspectives of Black individuals who were enslaved. My interest in narrative led me to get an English Literature degree, but also influenced me to want to understand more about people’s stories and how they lead to their reality, their living situations, and ultimately contribute to their health outcomes.”

Mehret said that her love and appreciation of narrative, of what is heard and what is not heard, and engaging people—particularly individuals who are historically marginalized—was fostered at Ellis.

“As a clinical scientist, things like a patient’s family history, individual history, and social history are critically important to helping me understand how to help them. All of that stems from not just an appreciation of science, but a love of humanities, and what we’re really focused on with the EMBRACE Center is community-centered science as it relates to the population. It’s more than hard skills in biology or chemistry or physics or even clinical medicine. It's multifactorial. It's contextual. And I think that's really what has made our partnership so rich: because of what we learned at Ellis, we're kind of speaking the same language.”

The EMBRACE (Equity in Maternal and Birthing Outcomes and Reproductive Health through Community Engagement) Center of Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh is the culmination of more than a decade of collaborative work and research in maternal health. The Center’s mission is to advance maternal and reproductive health equity and justice through multidisciplinary research, training, practice, and policy efforts focused on Black birthing people in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania and the surrounding region.

The EMBRACE Center was the result of a U54 mechanism, or a Specialized Center Cooperative Agreement, put out by NIH in 2022 specifically for maternal health centers of excellence. It was the first time that NIH had put such a high level of investment behind maternal health, and it served as a call to action for Dara, Mehret, and Tamar, who had each developed careers connected to the health sciences over the years and were colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh.

At the time the U54 mechanism was released, the alumnae were members of the University’s CONVERGE community, a multidisciplinary collaboration of scholars who conduct and translate research focused on sexual and reproductive health, with particular attention to marginalized populations. Together with their CONVERGE partners, as well as community organizations like Healthy Start, the women pooled their expertise and submitted a proposal to NIH in December 2022 for a center focused on birth equity and maternal health in Allegheny County. 

“The premise of EMBRACE was, and is, to uplift maternal health equity with a focus on Black populations who bear the disproportionate burden of maternal mortality and morbidity, but also reproductive justice,” said Dara. “Our goal in submitting our proposal was to bring together academic community partners to address maternal health inequities in our region using a multi-level, multi-disciplinary approach.” 

Submitting for the NIH grant, however, turned into a hard lesson in perseverance. Though the team behind EMBRACE felt confident about their proposal, they found out in August 2023 that they had been denied.

“At first NIH told us no, and it was a very difficult pill to swallow,” said Dara. “The review of our center had one of the top scores in the country, and we had been communicating with other applicants and colleagues across the nation who were telling us how well we had performed. But at that time NIH said that they wouldn’t fund us because our region wasn’t a priority. It was so unfortunate, because we knew about all the inequities and happenings in our area that would make it a prime location to do that type of work.”

The EMBRACE team was understandably disappointed—until they received a surprising email in March 2024. Congress had approved additional funding for NIH, and based on the EMBRACE Center’s outstanding review, NIH had decided to extend them a grant after all.

“It was an emotional rollercoaster,” said Dara. “Throughout the whole process we tried to be as communicative as possible with everyone across the board who had invested so much time and energy into the proposal. It was like a dream that everything fell into place and came together for us to be able to do this collective work. And I think for the three of us to still be in this space, in this place, working collaboratively is so exciting.”

The EMBRACE Center of Excellence officially began in August 2024, building on years of work and research that the alumnae and their other team members had conducted individually and collectively before receiving the NIH funding. 

With the grant, EMBRACE has been able to focus on health systems level interventions that build on local infrastructure around interconceptional and fourth trimester care. The interventions center on the critical postpartum period, and supporting pregnant and birthing people. The EMBRACE Center also includes a community component that promotes bidirectional learning, a training component that features education in reproductive health equity and justice, and an active research project that seeks to integrate reproductive justice and racial equity to develop new models of fourth trimester and interconception care.

Dara and Mehret serve as Multi-Principal Investigators for EMBRACE, and Tamar plays a central role in the Center’s research projects. Together with their colleagues, they are advancing interdisciplinary research guided by reproductive justice principles so that more birthing people in marginalized groups receive the essential postpartum care they need. One example of an initiative that is being incorporated into EMBRACE’s postpartum research and intervention is a guaranteed income pilot. The pilot provides birthing people with eight weeks of guaranteed income totaling $4,500, similar to a paid parental leave, and studies how that financial support affects physical and mental health, engagement with the health care system, and reintegration into the workforce.

“Many parents are unable to go back into the workforce after giving birth because of the cost of childcare and other unanticipated costs they may have,” Tamar said. “We are very interested in studying how providing people with a guaranteed income during the postpartum period will affect their choices, especially regarding whether and when they will reenter the workforce and how that decision plays a role in their health and wellbeing. But also, being able to care for yourself and your infant is a basic human right. The more, and the longer, we can support people to thrive and meet their needs during such an important period of their lives, the better. We’ve structured this as a small-scale pilot, but we’re also very interested in seeking larger support to expand the number of people we can help and the length of time we are able to help them. We want to be able to both support people and really learn from them over time.”

The EMBRACE Center is a shining example of the kind of work that can be accomplished by brave, bold, changemakers who care deeply about others and are curious about the world around them. The alumnae feel that their shared connection to Ellis has more than just a little to do with that.

“It’s no accident that we’re in this space, doing this work together,” said Dara. “The work we are doing with EMBRACE is bold, and we’re often asked why we’re doing it—because there’s not much money in it, or support. But this work is central to our being, and is critical to the lives of the people that we care about and the communities that we care about. There are many elements of what we are doing now that ties back to what we were able to learn and gain at Ellis. Being in an environment that allowed me to be free in myself, where I knew my voice mattered, where I was encouraged to use my voice in new and innovative ways—there’s no way to explain how much of an impact I know that had on me.”

“We’re all born as scientists,” Tamar said. “Children are fearless hypothesis testers and evidence gatherers, but I think sometimes our institutional and societal structures can dampen that natural curiosity. The Ellis School, however, does an amazing job of fostering and celebrating that innate curiosity. As an academic, it can be easy to go down the path of least resistance, for example, picking research that you know will be funded right away instead of pursuing the things you’re most curious about, or the things that you believe will improve society most. EMBRACE is driven by our curiosity and a deep commitment to informed, evidence-based change.”

“In order to be bold—to have the confidence, the fortitude, the clarity, the knowledge that you have a voice and you want to change the way things are done—having a foundation is crucial,” adds Mehret. “We really are standing on the shoulders of the people who supported us: Judy COHEN Callomon ’54, Joanna Schultz, Dr. Norma Greco, Robin Newham, Dr. Ellen Bedell, and so many others. The impact that Ellis had on us is, no doubt, a part of the EMBRACE Center in its own way, and that’s something that we really want to celebrate.”

As Drs. Méndez, Birru Talabi, and Krishnamurti continue to expand the EMBRACE Center and work to help more women access essential postpartum health care, their legacy will only continue to grow. It’s not only extraordinary to think of the mark they’re making on the community where their friendship first blossomed, but to realize it’s possible for some of the babies who benefit from EMBRACE’s support to someday become changemaking Ellis students themselves. 

The potential for such an astonishing full-circle scenario certainly isn’t something found everyday, but it just goes to show that when Ellisians work together, there’s no limit to what they can achieve.

“It means something deep to be able to do this work here, to be able to invest in the communities that have invested in us, directly and indirectly,” says Mehret. “We are from Pittsburgh. We grew up in Pittsburgh. We are raising children in Pittsburgh. We are investing back in Pittsburgh.”