“Materniti aims to become the new gold standard for accessible, affordable, and community-based perinatal mental health care for new mothers,” says Bryce Riffenburgh-Kirby. 

He teamed up with two other students in Berkeley and UCSF’s master of translational medicine program, Eera Sarda and Prarthana Prashanth, to search for the best way to support maternal health through Berkeley’s Regional NSF I-Corps program and developed Materniti, a program and platform for new mothers to seek and access effective care from their third trimester into new motherhood. Even though one in seven women experience postpartum mood disorder, the team found that few receive adequate screening or support. 

To address this, “we’ve designed a scalable care model consisting of informal, expert-led group sessions, in which mothers gain access to both clinically accurate information and peer-to-peer social interaction,” says Bryce. The app will group mothers together into cohorts and match them together based on their shared needs. “Our focus is on creating accessibility, equity of care, and mutual value for both the mothers and partnering clinical experts.”

In the CoLab, the team hopes to continue growing its network of experts and its technical-resource pool, complete its app, put the finishing touches on its program, and run its first pilot program here in the Bay Area.