Welcome! Thank you for visiting. If you are accessing this page, it is likely that you or someone you love has experienced a Hypertensive Disorder of Pregnancy (HDP). I would first like to acknowledge that experience and wish you good health going forward.
The purpose of this site is to provide HDP survivors and their families with support, education, and opportunities to get involved in ongoing research studies. I welcome your contributions, questions, and concerns, and you can always reach out to me directly at melisslw@usc.edu.
I am an Associate Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. I have been studying preeclampsia for over 20 years, focusing on a wide array of topics. I feel passionately that pregnancy and childbirth should be a beautiful event, and not the stressful, life-changing event that occurs when a woman develops HDP. I have dedicated much of my life to finding the underlying causes of HDP, with a particular focus on genetic susceptibility. My primary interest is in “imprinted” genes, a class of genes that are expressed only from the copy that is inherited from the mother or sometimes, the father. Thus, I study mother-baby-father triads in an attempt to better assess parental lineage of a particular genetic marker and whether, when inherited from that parent, there is a change in the risk of developing HDP.
Over the years, I have had the great honor of learning about your experiences with HDP and hope to contribute to the well-being of all women and their families, but especially during the crucial pregnancy period.