Publications

No Time to Wait: The Healthy Kids Strategy, Healthy Kids Panel 
February, 2013

Scarred for life? The biology of childhood hardship 
Marla B. Sokolowski , W. Thomas Boyce and Bruce S. McEwen
January 23, 2013

RSC Expert Panel - Early Childhood Development
Co-Chairs and Editors: Michel Boivin and Clyde Hertzman

The impact of breastfeeding on FTO-related BMI growth trajectories: an application to the Raine pregnancy cohort study
Taraneh Abarin, Yan Yan Wu, Nicole Warrington, Stephen Lye, Craig Pennell, and Laurent Briollais

CIFAR researchers author new volume that changes our understanding of the early years of human life
October 9, 2012

For the first time, scientists have amassed a large collection of research that looks “under the skin”, to examine how and why experiences interact with biology starting before birth to affect a life course.Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the special volume titled ‘Biological Embedding of Early Social Adversity: From Fruit Flies to Kindergartners’ sets out an emerging new field of the developmental science of childhood adversity.

Authored largely by researchers in CIFAR’s Experience-based Brain & Biological Development program and edited by co-directors W. Thomas Boyce (University of British Columbia) and Marla B. Sokolowski (University of Toronto) as well as Gene E. Robinson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), the volume was inspired by an Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium co-hosted by CIFAR and the National Academy of Sciences in December, 2011.

Published Sackler Colloquium articles in PNAS (October, 2012):

• Nancy Adler (University of California, San Fransisco): Rigor, vigor, and the study of health disparities


• Ronald G Barr (University of British Columbia): Abusive head trauma: Preventing a failure of normal caregiver-infant interaction.

• W. Thomas Boyce (University of British Columbia): Social stratification, classroom 'climate' and the behavioral adaptation of kindergarten children.


• Frances Champagne (Columbia University): Paternal social enrichment effects on maternal behavior and offspring growth


• David F Clayton (Queen Mary, University of London): The impact of experience-dependent and -independent factors on gene expression in songbird brain.


• Greg Duncan (University of California, Irivine): Early childhood poverty, immune-mediated disease processes, and adult productivity


• Lia C. H. Fernald (University of California at Berkeley): Socio-economic gradients in child development in very young children: Evidence from India, Indonesia, Peru and Senegal.


• Russell D Fernald (Stanford University): How does social information change the brain?


• Megan Gunnar (University of Minnesota): Associations between early life adversity and executive function in children adopted internationally from orphanages


• Takao K Hensch (Harvard University): A critical period for acoustic preference in mice.


• Clyde Hertzman (University of British Columbia): Biological embedding: Putting the concept in perspective.


• Annette Karmiloff-Smith (Birbeck University of London): Genetic and environmental vulnerabilities in children with neurodevelopmental disorders


• Michael S Kobor (University of British Columbia): Biological and environmental predictors of variable DNA methylation in a human community cohort.


• Bryan Kolb (University of Lethbridge): Experience and the developing prefrontal cortex.


• Joel D. Levine (University of Toronto, Mississauga): Social structures depend on innate determinants and chemosensory processing in Drosophila.


• Tom McDade (Northwestern University): Early environments and the ecology of inflammation


• Bruce McEwen (Rockefeller University): Brain on stress: How the social environment gets under the skin


• Michael J. Meaney (McGill University and Douglas Hospital Research Centre): Variations in postnatal maternal care and the epigenetic regulation of Grm1 expression and hippocampal function in the rat.


• Charles Nelson (Harvard University): Effects of early intervention and the moderating effects of brain activity on institutionalized children's social skills at age 8


• Michael Rutter (King's College London): Achievements and challenges in the biology of environmental effects.


• Jack Shonkoff (Harvard University): Leveraging the biology of adversity to address the roots of disparities in health and development


• Marla B Sokolowski (University of Toronto): Gene-environment interplay in Drosophila melanogaster: Chronic food deprivation in early-life affects adult exploratory and fitness traits.


• Moshe Szyf (McGill University): Conserved epigenetic sensitivity to early life experience in the rat and human hippocampus.


• Janet F. Werker (University of British Columbia): Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception.