ECI biocommentary: Catherine Buck

I caught the research bug in high school, where one of my fantastic teachers developed a biotechnology course and was gifted an automated DNA sequencer (the first high school in the country to have such technology!) for use in class research projects. I remember taking a fieldtrip to MIT at the height of the National Human Genome Project to tour one of the labs. While in college I continued to explore the basic sciences but was ultimately drawn to clinical and translational research during medical school and beyond.

As a neonatologist, I am in awe of the developmental progress our sickest infants must make during their time in the NICU. I began to study how early life exposures, such as environmental chemicals, impact growth and development during my fellowship training under the mentorship of Dr. Joseph Braun at the School of Public Health at Brown. This early work inspired additional translational studies of how alterations in energy metabolism hormones may predict growth and adiposity development over time. My research program is now focused on understanding how early perinatal and newborn exposures, such as diabetes or obesity in pregnancy, influence growth and development in preterm infants. This includes adiposity development, which was the aim of our study in this issue of Pediatric Research in which my co-author, Dr. Kristin Santoro, and I have explored the use of point of care ultrasound to examine regional adiposity in a multicenter cohort of very preterm infants.