Lorraine V. Klerman, Dr.P.H., is Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Maternal and Child Health, School of Public Health, University of Alabama at Birmingham.   She is a health services researcher with particular interest in health delivery systems for economically deprived women and children.

In 1965, Dr. Klerman initiated her research on adolescent childbearing while she was at the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale School of Medicine.  She and her colleagues studied one of the first comprehensive service programs for school-age mothers, the Young Mothers Program.  The program was a collaborative effort of the Yale-New Haven Hospital, the New Haven Board of Education, and the local anti-poverty agency.  The five-year research project, supported by the federal Children's Bureau, resulted in many journal articles and a book, School-Age Mothers:  Problems, Programs, and Policy.

Although Dr. Klerman continued to study the problems of adolescent sexuality, pregnancy, and parenting during her subsequent years at the Florence Heller Graduate University, she broadened her field of interest to include child welfare issues.   When she returned to Yale in1984, she began teaching maternal and child health.   Her research interests expanded to other aspects of maternal health, such as prenatal care and family planning, and to other aspects of adolescent health, particularly school absenteeism.  As a result, she served as a consultant to the Institute of Medicine Committee on Low Birthweight and as a member of its committees on prenatal care and unintended pregnancies.  She also served on the Public Health Service's Expert Panel on Prenatal Care and the Carnegie Corporation of New York's Task Force on Meeting the Needs of Young Children.  While at Yale, she also completed a monograph, Alive and Well?  A Research and Policy Review of Health Programs for Poor Young Children, for the National Center for Children in Poverty.

At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Dr. Klerman also holds appointments in the Department of Pediatrics, the Civitan International Research Center, and the Lister Hill Policy Center.  She is Associate Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded project, "Smoke-Free Families;"  Co-Principal Investigator of the Mother and Family Specialty Center, and innovative approach to prenatal care funded by the federal Agency for Health Policy and Research; and the director of the local evaluation of Birmingham's Healthy Start project and several other research projects.

Dr. Klerman has published extensively in professional journal's and books.  She speaks frequently before professional groups.  She has served on many national, state, and local advisory groups and currently is a member of the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Perinatal Transmission of HIV.

She is a graduate of Cornell University and the Harvard School of Public Health.   In 1993 she received the J. Roswell Gallagher Award of the Society for Adolescent Medicine and in 1996, the American Public Health Association's Martha May Eliot Award for exceptional health services to mothers and children.