Center for Child, Adolescent and Family Life Epidemiology

The Center is grounded in four primary principles. First is the understanding that outcomes for children and families cross traditional boundaries of health, education, social welfare, and therefore inter-disciplinary research and training are essential. Second, the world we live in is multicultural and global in nature. Old paradigms of developed and developing are no longer appropriate; a global continuum approach is essential. Third, mortality, an important and readily measured outcome, must also be complemented by functional measures such as child development and disability and quality of life. Fourth, there are almost universal, systematic and ongoing disparities in access to health care, education and welfare which are mirrored in widening disparities in outcomes for children, adolescents and their families. These must be addressed in research and training.

The CAFLE Center conducts research and provides training to masters, doctoral and post doctoral students as well as mentoring junior faculty. It uses epidemiological approaches in collaboration with other approaches such as ethnography and qualitative studies in multi-disciplinary studies to investigate child, adolescent and family life to include, but go beyond, narrow definitions of health. The CAFLE Center is modeled to provide an environment of scholarly and lively debate at the forefront of research methodology to academics partnering with communities. The Center conducts both descriptive and evaluative work addressing key challenges and interventions both in the USA and abroad.

Central areas of expertise include: perinatal interventions, the study of injury, child development and disability, family violence, maternal and perinatal outcomes, and multicultural influences on health and wellbeing.

Methodologic themes include randomized trials of community and institutional interventions, evaluation of measures of wellbeing in children and their families, measurement of disability and of functional status, approaches to screening.

Current Research Projects
Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) in Bangladesh : 2001-2007 - Funded

Age Specific Approaches to Intimate Partner Violence 2003-2006 - Funded

Healthy Relationships Project: Dating and Conflict. 2005-2007 - Funded

Evaluation Component of Project Thrive: The Public Policy Analysis and

Education Center for Infant and Early Childhood - Funded.

Health and Psychosocial Need: Children with developmental disabilities in a time of HIV - Seeking funding.

Women, Infants and Neonates Next-Step Evidentiary Research - Seeking funding for five components.

Training
Though newly established, the Center is developing training through teaching, mentoring and advising of graduate students at Columbia. We plan to expand training internationally through work with sister schools in other countries in the area of disability and development. Training is also offered to research and clinical staff in international research projects. There is ongoing collaborative learning involving faculty and graduate students through the Family and Partner Violence Research Seminar and the planned Interdisciplinary Child Developmental Outcomes Working Group.

With the Imprint Center, we are about to submit an application for a federally funding training program in Reproductive, Perinatal and Pediatric Epidemiology.

Director
Founding director Leslie L. Davidson BA, MD, MSc (Epid), FAAP is a pediatrician and an epidemiologist. Her primary research interests are disability in children; international child health, screening, and epidemiology; and prevention of accidents and violence, particularly intimate partner violence. She has worked in an international team that developed an efficient approach to screen children for disability in developing countries (The TQ) and, for five years, led the Central Harlem School Health Program, launching childhood injury surveillance in Northern Manhattan linked to the development and evaluation of the Harlem Hospital Injury Prevention Program. From 1992 Dr. Davidson worked in England as a Regional Pediatric Epidemiologist in the NHS and senior lecturer in King's College and, until 2002, as Director of the National Pediatric Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford . In addition to her research interests in child disability and in partner violence, she is also senior health advisor to Project THRIVE of the National Center for Children in Poverty which assists States working to forge early comprehensive child care systems as well as chairs the Doctoral Committee in Epidemiology.

Faculty
Department of Epidemiology
Leslie L. Davidson (LLD1@columbia.edu)
Nancy Sloan (nls35@columbia.edu)
Anne Paxton (ap428@columbia.edu)
Victor Penchaszadeh (vbp2002@columbia.edu)

Affiliated Faculty
Cassie Landers (cl689@columbia.edu) HDPFM