How do Social Inequities Get
Under the Skin in the Perinatal Period?
Research has shown that social and relational adversities—including childhood trauma, discrimination, material hardship, and chronic stress—are associated with lasting differences in development and health that extend across generations. Exposure to these conditions is patterned by racism, colonialism, socioeconomic inequality, and other structural forces.
How social conditions influence biological and developmental processes during pregnancy and early childhood remains an important question. Epigenetic processes, including DNA methylation, may help illuminate how experiences become biologically embedded.
Our research investigates how DNA methylation varies in relation to social and relational environments during the perinatal period and how these patterns relate to early development.
Can Interventions Get Back Under the Skin to Remediate Health Disparities?
Across the globe, interventions during pregnancy and early childhood aim to accompany families facing social inequities, to promote maternal and child health.
Perinatal RISE is working to develop biological markers that can strengthen how perinatal interventions are evaluated. Effects on children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development may take years to emerge. Biological markers could offer earlier signs of response while helping us understand which interventions work, how they produce change, and when they may have the greatest impact.
Randomized trials give us a powerful way to identify biological signals that respond to meaningful changes in families’ social and caregiving environments, rather than relying only on associations. In turn, these markers may help us see whether interventions are reaching the biological processes they are designed to change. Our goal is to build better tools for evaluating interventions that support healthy development and reduce inequities across generations.