In this episode, our CEO Arlene Limas OLY, chats with Dr. Mary Clyde Pierce, Pediatric Emergency Physician at Lurie Children's Hospital and Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University. Together they discuss violence as an environmental toxin, the adverse effects of violence on children and their genetics, and the future of genetics in the role of violence prevention.
Dr. Pierce's research interest focuses primarily on children's injuries, emphasizing differentiating abusive from accidental trauma. Dr. Pierce collaborates with a multi-disciplinary lab with an emphasis on injury biomechanics. This lab combines the expertise of medicine and engineering and utilizes both a clinical and an experimental approach. Dr. Pierce's research focus is the development of injury plausibility models, including clinical decision rules, for differentiating abusive and accidental trauma in the young child that combines medical, social, biological, and engineering knowledge. Her interest is also in epigenetics, psychosocial risk factors, factors, ecological factors, and how child maltreatment confers health problems later in life. This collaborative work results in translational research that is guided by case-based studies with clinical, social, and basic science research, experiments, and modeling directly linked to pertinent clinical issues.