Perinatal Pathways Lab

We conduct research studies with pregnant women and their babies to improve their well–being and their future children’s lives.

For over 20 years, we have contributed to the scientific evidence showing that when pregnant women experience stress, anxiety, and depression, it affects them as well as their offspring in utero. There is a ‘third pathway’ for the familial inheritance of risk for psychiatric illness beyond shared genes and the quality of parental care: the impact of pregnant women’s distress on fetal and infant brain–behavior development. Our projects involve fetal assessment, newborn neuroimaging, genetics, epigenetics, psychoneuroimmunology, mother–child interaction, and supportive interventions to (1) characterize maternal experiences and the effects on children’s development and (2) promote maternal psychobiological health for the mother–child dyad.

We study a possible third pathway by which risk for psychiatric disorders runs in families.

We investigate pregnant women’s experiences — depression, stress, medication use, and nutrition — as they shape fetal and infant neurobehavioral development, with implications for the future child’s mental health. This research pushes the study of the mother–infant dyad to an earlier time, prior to birth, and considers psychological and biological factors as the mechanisms of maternal influence. We also conduct clinical trials of interventions during the perinatal period to improve women’s well-being for her, and for her child.

Our work is part of a burgeoning research domain known as the developmental origins of health and disease (DoHAD).

Based on animal models as well as epidemiological and observational samples, findings indicate that distress–based changes in pregnant women’s biology are associated with adverse cardiovascular, metabolic, as well as psychological effects in children and adults. In our DoHAD studies, we focus on the perinatal period, the time when the maternal influence is thought to occur, and on children’s neurobehavioral development. We have four primary research questions carried out across a number of studies.

Principal Investigator

Research Staff