Guest: Dr. Catherine Monk, a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, and Obstetrics & Gynecology, Director of Research at the Women’s Program, Columbia University Medical Center, and Research Scientist VI at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

In this episode, we will cover:

1. How to have a developmental outlook throughout pregnancy and early childhood to really see how optimal of a time the transition to parenting is.
2. When stress and depression affect pregnancy, find out how to help yourself as a mother and how to help your baby too.
3. How understanding the importance of development and the environment could change the way you raise and interact with your child.

Resources mentioned in the conversation:

• Developmental Origins of Health & Disease
• Podcast #071 about the movie, In-Utero
• Link to watch the movie, In-Utero

About Dr. Catherine Monk:

Dr. Catherine Monk is a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, and Obstetrics & Gynecology, Director of Research at the Women’s Program, Columbia University Medical Center, and Research Scientist VI at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Originally trained as a clinical psychologist treating children and adults in a program that emphasized the developmental origins of psychopathology, Dr. Monk completed her postdoctoral research training in the Psychobiological Sciences via a National Institutes of Health fellowship at Columbia University in 2000, joining the faculty there a year later.

A two-time recipient of the prestigious Brain & Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Award, her research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health since she her first support as NIH ‘K’ Career Development awardee in 2001. Dr. Monk’s research brings together the fields of perinatal psychiatry, developmental psychobiology, and neuroscience to focus on the earliest influences on children’s developmental trajectories — those that happen in utero and how to intervene early to prevent risk for mental health disorders in the future children. She is internationally recognized for her contributions to the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease Research model.

Most recently, Dr. Monk has been awarded key roles on the NIH-wide ECHO project, Environmental influences on Children’s Health Outcomes — a seven year, nationwide effort to study early factors, including prenatal, in children’s health outcomes across 50,000 participants. She is a PI on one ECHO award, Investigator on another, and elected by her peers to a two-year term to the ECHO Executive Committee.