Bio

I was inspired to pursue pediatrics when I was seven and my brother passed away from a congenital heart defect. After undergrad, I worked at the same hospital where the surgical repair for my brother’s defect was developed. While getting to take care of a lot of patients like my brother, I experienced the tremendous amount of stress parents and children undergo while in intensive care. Throughout my years as a clinician and professor of pediatrics, I learned that adverse childhood experiences or ACEs are ubiquitous and have lifelong impacts on health and well-being...but our current healthcare and medical education system falls terribly short of addressing them. From this realization, I became obsessed with the desire to influence my clinical practice with my own research. I thought to myself - done are the days that I give another care recommendation or protocol to a mom or child not rooted in maternal and child research. I asked myself - how can I possibly only measure and track a child’s height, weight, and head circumference when 80% of a child’s neurobiology forms before the age of 5? There’s so much more we can be doing for kids. I pursued a PhD at UCSF and got connected with the foremost researchers in early childhood stress physiology. After all of that work, I realized that the biggest takeaway from my research is that the single most well understood antidote to childhood stress is for children to have intimate relationships with their caregivers. And as a mom of a 7 and 9 year old, I have a deep desire to equip parents to be the positive, consistent caregivers in their child’s life.