Establishing Breastfeeding Online Course(s) & Continuing Education

Dr. Jane Morton has had a long, fulfilling career as a general pediatrician, She has also had a long-standing interest in breastfeeding, from understanding its clinical benefits to practical solutions for mothers having difficulty in providing breastmilk to their infants.  Over the years, she has conducted research on human milk and breastfeeding and has designed and implemented systems and policies to help breastfeeding mothers.  She produced award winning videos on this topic, including “Breastfeeding: A Guide to Getting Started”, “A Preemie Needs His Mother: Breastfeeding a Premature Baby” and “Making Enough Milk, the Key to Successful Breastfeeding”.  These have been translated and widely used in thousands of hospitals to train both staff and new mothers. As an executive board member of both the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine and the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Breastfeeding, she enjoyed working to enlarge the footprint of breastfeeding, both nationally and internationally.

For a 5 year period, she joined the neonatology clinical faculty at Stanford to develop the Breastfeeding Medicine Program.  In that position, she had the opportunity to design a nationally recognized educational program, conduct and publish original research on milk production and composition in mothers of very low birth weight infants, and publish a study with the AAP on the efficacy of a breastfeeding curriculum for physician residents in training. She was an advisor to the California Perinatal Quality Care Collaborative, and was a key author of the toolkit “Nutritional Support for the Very Low Birth Weight Infant”. She co-authored the book Best Medicine: Human Milk in the NICU.  She has published extensively and presented her original research and educational workshops internationally. She continues to teach at Stanford where she is an Adjunct Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, Emerita.

Suzanne Colson, PhD, MSc, BA, is a midwife and a nurse. Her thesis introduced a new breastfeeding paradigm called Biological Nurturing and won the prestigious English Royal College of Nursing Inaugural Akinsanya Award for originality and scholarship in doctoral studies. Suzanne is an Akinsanya scholar 2007, and a Visiting Principal Research Fellow at Canterbury Christ Church University. She is an honorary member and a founding mother/leader of La Leche League France. She is also on the professional advisory board of La Leche League of Great Britain. She has more than 40 years clinical experience supporting breastfeeding mothers in both hospital and community settings. Suzanne is the author of numerous articles, research papers, a book, translated into 4 languages and three DVDs. Retired from active midwifery practice, she organizes 5-day biological nurturing certification workshops, remains available for clinical consultation, and lectures widely across the world.

Carmela is a family medicine MD, bachelor´s degree in Public Health Education, and IBCLC since 2005. She is also a BFHI Evaluator and the co founder and past president of the Spanish Lactation Consultant Association (AECCLM). She works in a private Family Wellness Clinic, Raices, as person in charge of the lactation program, which includes two IBCLCs attending breastfeeding families and an extensive offer of breastfeeding training for health care professionals and breastfeeding peer counsellors. The team has trained over three thousand doctors, midwives and nurses from both the Spanish National Health Service and the private sector in Spain. She is a frequent lecturer at national conferences, and has also lectured internationally, both on-site and online. She is the author of several scientific papers on breast pain, mastitis and tongue tie. She is also the author of a breastfeeding/parenting book, “Amar con los Brazos Abiertos” (To Love with Open Arms). She is married to Carlos and they homeschool their four children.

Cindy Leclerc and Jana Stockham are Registered Nurses and IBCLCs with over 20 years experience helping families get started with breastfeeding. In addition to hands on care, Cindy and Jana use technology to support families through their website (cindyandjana.com), online prenatal breastfeeding classes (simplybreastfeeding.ca) and iPhone app, NuuNest. Cindy is a strong believer in mother-to-mother support, helping to facilitate breastfeeding and postpartum depression support groups. She is intrigued by all things online and actively uses social media to promote breastfeeding. Jana has been trained as a Baby Friendly assessor and helped to coordinate the first Baby Friendly designation in Saskatchewan. She has a passion to help families with new babies and facilitates a group for breastfeeding moms.

Professor Amy Brown is based in the Department of Public Health, Policy and Social Sciences at Swansea University in the UK. With a background in psychology, she has spent the last thirteen years exploring psychological, cultural and societal influences upon infant feeding decisions in the first year. Her research seeks to understand how we can shift our perception of how babies are fed away from an individual mothering issue to a wider public health problem – with societal level solutions. Dr Brown has published over 60 papers exploring the barriers women face in feeding their baby during the first year. She is a mother to three human children and three book babies: Breastfeeding Uncovered: Who really decides how we feed our babies, Why starting solids matters, and The Positive Breastfeeding Book: Everything you need to feed your baby with confidence. She is a regular blogger, aiming to change the way we think about breastfeeding, mothering and caring for our babies.