Mary Renfrew

Mary Renfrew (born 1955) is a British midwife and academic. She graduated in nursing from the University of Edinburgh in 1975 and in midwifery from the same institution in 1978, and she obtained a PhD on breastfeeding in 1982 while at the Medical Research Council's reproductive biology unit in Edinburgh. From 1988 to 1994 she worked at the national perinatal epidemiology unit of the University of Oxford, where she set up the National Midwifery Research Initiative. She was then professor of midwifery at the University of Leeds until 2003 and professor of mother and infant health at the University of York from 2003, and as of 2017 she is professor of mother and infant health and an associate dean of research at Dundee University. She has written reviews of breastfeeding for the Cochrane Library, the World Health Organization and several British health bodies, and has chaired the World Health Organization's maternal and newborn health strategic committee. In 2014 she became the first midwife or nurse elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and she was appointed OBE in 2022.