Marianne Neifert, MD
Silver & Gold Award
(2024)
The Silver and Gold Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Medical Alumni Association, recognizes a graduate who demonstrates excellence in humanitarianism, citizenship, and professionalism, outstanding service to the community, and contributions to the art and science of medicine.
Marianne Neifert, MD, affectionately known as “Dr. Mom,” has been a trailblazer in breastfeeding medicine, parenting education, and compassionate healthcare for over five decades. Her enduring commitment to improving maternal and child health by promoting, supporting, and teaching breastfeeding management has helped launch the new specialty of Breastfeeding and Lactation Medicine and inspired generations of healthcare providers and parents. The middle child among five, raised in a military family, Marianne felt deep empathy for schoolmates with medical challenges, and by age 10, had determined to become a physician. She graduated high school as valedictorian and student body president and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa collegiate honor society and Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society.
Dr. Neifert’s career in medicine was profoundly shaped by her personal journey of marrying young, having her first child before graduating college at the age of 20, birthing two more babies during medical school and two during internship and residency training. With minimal maternity leave and without electric breast pumps nor lactation breaks, sustaining breastfeeding was a daunting challenge. Dr. Neifert’s personal parenting experiences led her to choose clinical rotations in the maternity ward and NICU, where she found immense fulfillment combining her medical training, personal experience, and passion for supporting new mothers in transitioning to parenthood and achieving their breastfeeding goals.
After graduating medical school and completing her pediatric residency in Colorado, Marianne joined the CU SOM Pediatric faculty, teaching for 10 years in the nation’s second physician assistant program and cultivating unique expertise in lactation management. As U.S. breastfeeding rates began to rise, following three decades of a national formula-feeding norm (up to 1970s), health professionals were unequipped to teach the art of breastfeeding or manage lactation challenges. In 1985, Dr. Neifert co-pioneered with Joy Seacat, PhD, the first U.S. comprehensive, hospital-based lactation program, establishing the prototype for optimal maternity, lactation-care standards. She also co-founded Denver Mothers’ Milk Bank, Colorado Breastfeeding Coalition, and Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine.
Marianne’s clinical passion has been the prevention of infant breastfeeding morbidities related to failure to recognize newborns at risk for ineffective breastfeeding and/or mothers at risk for insufficient milk production. She and Joy introduced routine test-weighing of underweight breastfed infants to measure milk transfer and published maternal causes of insufficient lactation.
In addition to her clinical lactation contributions, Dr. Neifert’s recognition as “Dr. Mom” provided a national platform to empower parents through her multitude of media interviews, five parenting books, and decades-long, positive parenting columns for multiple magazines. An inexhaustible conference speaker, she has educated health professionals and parents in all 50 states!
Marianne has an enduring history of volunteerism, including teaching adult and children’s Sunday School, speaking at schools, churches, and parenting groups, teaching ESL and citizenship preparation. She earned a Master of Theological Studies in midlife and has long taught in religious, life skills, and parenting programs for female inmates at her county jail.
Dr. Neifert counts her five magnificent children as her greatest life blessing and ultimate source of inspiration and pride.