Professor Shahla Meedya is the Professor of Midwifery at the Centre for Nursing and Midwifery Research (CNMR) at Western Sydney University and Nepean Blue Mountains Local Health District (LHD). She has over 25 years of experience in clinical practice, research, and education, focusing on women with both high-risk and low-risk conditions. She serves as one of the senior associate editors of Women and Birth.

Professor Meedya’s research focuses mainly on co-designing breastfeeding educational resources for women and their families, in both digital and non-digital formats (e.g., The Milky Way Program, app, and website), Quality improvement initiatives to translate evidence into clinical practice, and developing behaviour change models for women with high-risk pregnancies, particularly those managing diabetes and hypertension.

Professor Meedya is deeply committed to empowering women and people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds to have a voice in their care during the childbearing period. Her methodological expertise includes quantitative, mixed-methods, and co-design studies, particularly in the development of digital interventions and practice innovations towards promoting and supporting breastfeeding practices. The findings from her doctoral research demonstrated that participation in The Milky Way Program significantly increased breastfeeding rates by ninefold at one month postpartum, fourfold at four months, and threefold at six months. She successfully transformed The Milky Way Program into a mobile application, which is now a routine educational resource for women.

Professor Meedya has published more than 80 articles in midwifery and nursing, garnering thousands of citations https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ImKysaUAAAAJ&hl=en. She contributed to the development of national breastfeeding guidelines as an executive member of the Australian Baby Friendly Health Initiative (BFHI). She represented Australia at the WHO BFHI coordinators’ meeting in 2018. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she played a key role in transforming St George Hospital's face-to-face parenting education program into a digital format. In 2023, she received an international award from the Netherlands for one her PhD students’ work in using digital interventions to improve breastfeeding outcomes.

Professor Meedya has supervised many PhD, master’s, and honours students while she mentored numerous early-career researchers (ECRs). She is an active member and mentor in the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education. She has also held several leadership positions, including: Executive Member of the Human Research Ethics Committee at the University of Wollongong (three years); Head of Postgraduate Studies (one year), Honours Coordinator (two years), and Deputy Head of the Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum (LTAC) Committee (one year).

‪Shahla Meedya‬ - ‪Google Scholar‬