Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Henning Tiemeier, MA, MD, PhD, is Professor of Social and Behavioral Science and the Sumner and Esther Feldberg Chair of Maternal and Child Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Tiemeier received both his medical and sociological degree from the University of Bonn, Germany, and his PhD from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Since 2018, he leads the Maternal and Child Center of Excellence at Harvard Chan. As one of just 13 HRSA-funded Centers of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health in the United States, the center trains future leaders in the field. Dr. Tiemeier have worked broadly in pediatric epidemiology for more than 20 years with an emphasis on child developmental research. At Harvard his research focusses on high-risk children, such as preterm children and homeless families. Together with colleagues and non-governmental agencies he has begun a cohort of women in Boston shelters and their children.

Dr. Tiemeier has published extensively on the etiology of child developmental problems with a particular focus on prenatal exposures. His other research interests include social and family environmental determinants of brain development, parental feeding and child eating behavior, and psychometric studies of child development, among others. He is a principal investigator of the Generation R Study, a large pre-birth cohort in Rotterdam, that enrolled nearly 10,000 mothers and their children. Ongoing research projects and interests focus on genetic and early life exposures; as his previous work showed that this shapes the vulnerability to neurodevelopmental problems. His ongoing studies include investigate how parenting and other environmental risk factors relate to brain development as assessed by braining imaging.

Dr. Tiemeier has advised numerous masters, doctoral and postdoctoral students as a mentor, academic advisor and dissertation committee member. He is also a Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Dr. Tiemeier is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher (General Social Science).