Speaker: Heather H. Burris, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania Center for Research on Reproduction and Women’s Health, Attending Neonatologist, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Title: “Linking physical and social environmental factors to disparities in preterm birth”

Light Lunch will be served

Short Bio: Heather Burris, MD, MPH is a core faculty member at the Center for Pediatric Clinical Effectiveness (CPCE), an attending neonatologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and an assistant professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Burris is a perinatal researcher motivated by unequal birth outcomes across populations in the United States. She uses molecular epidemiologic approaches to study the intersection of social and environmental factors and how they contribute to birth outcome disparities. She directs a birth cohort based in Boston where she and her colleagues have recruited over 950 pregnant women to study psychosocial stress, resilience and epigenetic biomarkers in mothers and infants. Her team also mines large hospital-based and national population-based datasets to analyze other contributors to unequal perinatal care and outcomes. Dr. Burris received her medical degree from Temple University School of Medicine and completed her internship and residency at CHOP before moving to Boston for clinical and research fellowships, as well as a MPH in Clinical Effectiveness from Harvard School of Public Health. She returned to CHOP and Penn in 2017.