Rate My Professor Elise Erickson

Elise N. Erickson, PhD, CNM, FACNM, serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson, with additional appointments as Associate Professor in Clinical Translational Sciences, the BIO5 Institute, the Department of Pharmacy Practice and Science in the R. Ken Coit College of Pharmacy, and the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology. She earned a BSN from the University of Michigan in 2003, an MSN in Midwifery and Women’s Health from the University of Illinois Chicago in 2005, and a PhD in Nursing from Oregon Health & Science University in 2018. A Certified Nurse-Midwife with over 18 years of clinical experience, she practiced as a faculty midwife at OHSU from 2014 to 2022 and completed postdoctoral training through the NICHD K12 BIRCWH program (2018-2020) and NINR K99/R00 pathway (2020-2022) before joining the University of Arizona in 2022. Dr. Erickson directs the Mechanisms Underpinning Maternal Health (MuMH) Lab, an interdisciplinary team focused on translational research in maternal physiology.

Her research investigates physiological mechanisms governing parturition, with emphasis on genetic and epigenetic variations in oxytocin function to optimize its clinical use during labor and prevent postpartum hemorrhage, the leading cause of maternal morbidity. She also examines epigenetic aging as a biomarker of uterine function, influences of social determinants of health on maternal outcomes, and predictive analytics using wearable devices combined with AI and machine learning to anticipate labor onset and pregnancy complications. Dr. Erickson specializes in latent mixture modeling for heterogeneous phenomena. She has received major funding including a $2.9 million R01 grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2023) and an Arizona Biomedical Research Center grant (2025). Select publications include "Deep Learning Model Using Continuous Skin Temperature Data Predicts Labor Onset" (BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 2024), "Role of Physiologic and Pharmacologic Oxytocin in Labor Progress" (book chapter, 2024), and "A Common OXTR Risk Variant Alters Regulation of Gene Expression by DNA Hydroxymethylation in Pregnant Human Myometrium" (Reproductive Sciences, 2024). As Co-Chair of the Research & Standards Committee for the American College of Nurse-Midwives and an associate member of the Arizona Maternal Mortality Review Committee, she advances personalized, evidence-based maternal health strategies.