Doctoral Student Receives NICHD Award

Chelsea McKinney has been awarded a three-year research supplement to promote diversity in health-related research from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

McKinney, who is pursuing a PhD in human development and social policy and a master’s in public health at Northwestern, will use the NICHD grant to examine how grandmothers’ involvement affects breastfeeding and child health outcomes. Her study uses field interviews and various biomarkers to follow two cohorts of young mothers and pregnant mothers: one enrolled at birth and another when subsequent births occur.

Thanks to her dual academic pursuits, McKinney is positioned to approach health inequity from a multidisciplinary lens. “I want the health sector to think about child health from a family systems perspective, and social scientists to think about the real world implications of their research,” she said.

McKinney’s study will be part of the Community Action for Child Health Equity (CACHE), co-led by pediatrician Madeline Shalowitz, an IPR faculty associate who is part of C2S.
The CACHE study is part of the Community Child Health Network study (CCHN), which is exploring how communities and families create contexts that influence pregnancy and early childhood health outcomes across five U.S. sites.

The CCHN study also aims to create more effective child health interventions in low-income African American and Latino communities through multidisciplinary, community-based, and participatory research.

“Chelsea brings strong expertise in social science and public health to the study and will expand the breadth of her distinct multidisciplinary training in health inequity,” said developmental psychologist Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, director of C2S and an IPR faculty fellow.