Data Core

A field-wide scarcity of fundamentally dyadic research on mother-child health outcomes has thus far posed a challenge to identifying and addressing primary prevention opportunities. The Center for Early Relational Health works in partnership with Columbia’s departments of Pediatrics, Obstetrics, and Psychiatry through the award-winning Maternal Child Research Operations (MaCRO) team science model to enable fast, accurate, multidisciplinary maternal-child data generation. 

Bringing together MaCRO’s interdepartmental team science model and COMBO’s singular data set (which emerged from an early MaCRO working group), the center is building a state-of-the-art, federated, fundamentally dyadic data core to make de-identified data readily available to researchers interested in perinatal medicine: across both parent and child, at Columbia and beyond. 

Whereas most institutional data remains siloed, the center’s data core will put data directly into the hands of researchers, unlocking repositories and combining them in a singular, unified resource. The center’s data, including a biospecimen core, is for all Columbia researchers interested in perinatal medicine across both mother and child, leveraging MaCRO’s groundbreaking consortium model to integrate large interdisciplinary data sets. 

Led by Paul Curtin, PhD and Christine Austin, PhD, this unprecedented data core will facilitate exceptionally flexible, efficient, open-science research, increasing data velocity to build the evidence base for future validated interventions.