Centers

Founding director Leslie L. Davidson BA, MD, MSc (Epid), MRCP (London), FAAP, is a pediatrician and an epidemiologist. Her primary research interests are disability in children; international child health, screening, and epidemiology; and prevention of accidents and violence, particularly intimate partner violence. She has worked as a member of an international team that developed an efficient approach to screening children for disability in developing countries (the TQ) and, for five years, led the Central Harlem School Health Program, launching childhood injury surveillance in Northern Manhattan linked to the development and evaluation of the Harlem Hospital Injury Prevention Program.

From 1992, Dr. Davidson worked in England as a Regional Pediatric Epidemiologist in the NHS, as senior lecturer in King's College and, until 2002, as Director of the National Pediatric Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford. In addition to pursuing research interests in child disability and in partner violence, she is also senior health advisor to Project THRIVE of the National Center for Children in Poverty, which assists states working to forge early comprehensive child care systems, and is chair of the Mailman School’s Doctoral Committee in Epidemiology.