What Surrounds Us Shapes Us: How Developmental Environments Shape Lifelong Health and Wellbeing
On Wednesday, March 5th, from 1-1:50 PM in FXB G12 or online, please join us for the fourth installment of our Environments for Health and Happiness Seminar Series, featuring Dr. Lindsey Burghardt of the Harvard Center on the Developing Child.
Event Description:
This talk will discuss how, beginning well before birth, children’s development and lifelong health is shaped by the full range of experiences and exposures that they have in the places where they live, learn, play and grow. This includes the relationships they have with the adults in their lives, as well as with the built and natural environments that surround them. The developmental environment is affected and shaped by systemic forces such as climate change and structural racism, both of which shape development through their effects on children’s environments. Just as developmental environments have been designed by policy decisions made over time, there are things that all of us can do to redesign environments in a way that allows all children to thrive. We all have a role and solutions are at hand; collectively, we can care for the children in our society and ensure a bright future for us all.
Speaker Bio:
Lindsey Burghardt, MD, MPH, FAAP is the Chief Science Officer at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, where she develops and leads the Center’s scientific agenda. She is the founding director of the Center’s Early Childhood Scientific Council for Equity and the Environment, a multidisciplinary group that synthesizes and translates scientific mechanisms related to the many ways that the built and natural environments impact children’s development and lifelong health. She engages regularly in presentations and conversations with diverse stakeholders to communicate this science to a variety of audiences, with the goal of making it both accessible and actionable. Lindsey is also a practicing primary care pediatrician in the community outside of Boston and is board certified in pediatrics and pediatric emergency medicine. She completed her master’s in public health in health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Lunch will be provided.
