Janel came into her vocation as a birth worker organically. As a self-proclaimed “birth nerd”,  her comically unnatural fascination with placenta physiology led her to medical school where she specialized in and published work on clinical obstetrics and medical education. 

In 2016, Janel worked side-by-side with midwives and physicians to deliver up to 70+ births a day at Mulago National Hospital in Kampala, Uganda. Her essay chronicling her life-changing experience as a global health worker won international recognition from the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH).

Since then, Janel has attended hundreds of births and continues to be an advocate for empowered and compassionate birth. For Janel, birth is a threshold - a monumental and transformative experience for the birthing family - that leaves no one unchanged. Her own unplanned home birth to a daughter at 22 weeks added even more personal conviction to her belief in the positive impact birth support can have for expecting families. 

Janel is a seasoned educational resource for expecting families. In her role as Senior Birth Consultant at Phoebe since 2019, she designed the childbirth education and birth prep curriculum for their online platform, and currently leads the birth doula team, which provides virtual informational support to birthing families in the US, UK and Canada.

In 2020, Janel co-founded Birth to Baby Journey, with Manon Chevallerau. They provide in-person and virtual collaborative support to families in the NYC area, and also host doula education trainings for birth and postpartum workers.

Janel relies on her expertise and experience within hospital culture and the medical system to help her clients navigate the changing policies of the labor and postpartum wards in the NYC area. She provides families with science-driven information to help them make the most-informed decisions for their personalized care.