Titles

Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics

Professor of Medicine

Professor of Epidemiology & Public Health

School Affiliation

School of Medicine

Specialties

• Global child development
• Nutrition and child development
• Health disparities

About

410-706-2136 mblack@som.umaryland.edu

Dr. Black is a pediatric psychologist who has made significant contributions to the intersection of child development and nutrition. Dr. Black’s training is in developmental science and pediatric psychology. She is a licensed psychologist, chaired the Division of Growth and Nutrition in the Department of Pediatrics from 2003-2021, and directed an interdisciplinary Growth and Nutrition Practice for children with growth and /or feeding problems for 25 years. She spearheaded advances in child development by co-authoring three series of papers on early child development, published in The Lancet (2007, 2011, and 2017), including leading the first paper of the 2017 Lancet series, Advancing Early Childhood Development: from Science to Scale. That paper provided the scientific basis for the Nurturing Care Framework, which has been adopted by the World Health Assembly (2018) and advanced globally by WHO, UNICEF, and the World Bank Group. In recent work, she demonstrated that the principles of Nurturing Care apply from pre-conception through adolescence. Dr. Black has been instrumental in the development of the Global Scales for Early Development (GSED), a WHO-led, population-based scale to evaluate children’s development globally.

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Tagged: The Future of Health Care   Global Health   Ensuring Access and Equity in Health Care   Caring for the Human Condition   Research and Innovation  

This information was last updated May 31, 2023.