Columbia’s Irving Institute Honors MaCRO with the Inaugural “Team Science Award of Distinction for Clinical and Translational Research”

October 30, 2025

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Facing this century’s most urgent global health crisis, a pioneering group of clinicians at Columbia University came together to enable fast, efficient, accurate maternal-child research by innovating an unprecedented team science model under the MaCRO (Maternal Child Research Operations) Consortium — where COMBO itself was incubated. 

Now, 5 years later, those innovations have led to findings and collaborations that go well beyond the pandemic.

For this groundbreaking model, Columbia honored MaCRO in July 2024 with the inaugural Team Science Award of Distinction for Clinical and Translational Research, after 4 years of what they called “exemplary work across three departments [that] has made a significant impact on our understanding of maternal and child health… advancing science and improving lives.” 

The Story of MaCRO

In April 2020, the first known-Covid-positive mother in the country delivered her baby at Columbia’s Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in NYC—at that time, the pandemic’s epicenter. There was no data yet on how the virus would impact mothers’ health and well-being, their pregnancies, or their children’s development; and the clinicians caring for these families needed answers.

Leaders from the departments of Pediatrics, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Psychiatry came together to launch the Maternal Child Research Operations (MaCRO) Consortium to coordinate and support the efforts of anyone at Columbia doing mother-child research. 

MaCRO innovated a groundbreaking team science model that not only ensures no two individuals or teams across Columbia are investigating the same maternal-child research question; it connects researchers with others who may be valuable to their work and helps them build shared, accessible, actionable resources. In just 5 years, MaCRO has given rise to wide-ranging research that has made major strides in science, medicine, and, most importantly, improving outcomes for families.

MaCRO’s stand-out team science 

MaCRO creates true interdepartmental partnerships, enabling scientists to more holistically evaluate data — rather than looking at maternal outcomes or child outcomes in a vacuum, MaCRO’s teams work together to leverage every opportunity to understand how these outcomes influence each other, creating a fuller picture of mother-child health.

Maternal-infant and maternal-child research is particularly difficult because it hinges on the successful intersection of two distinct specialties. Few obstetricians or pediatricians have expertise in both moms and babies/children, in part because their specialties are so demanding (and sometimes high-risk). Without access to a team science infrastructure, their clinical knowledge and research data remain largely siloed from each other. For those striving to make a difference in the maternal-infant health field, that makes it challenging to even access the data they need, let alone to generate that data. 

“For example,” says Dr. Dani Dumitriu, a founding committee member of MaCRO and one of the representatives from the Department of Pediatrics, "even when maternal-child research is conducted by pediatric experts, it can be difficult to also involve obstetric experts to consider related maternal outcomes. Not only is that a missed opportunity to study dyadic mother-child relational health, it can lead to misinterpretation of data and unsubstantiated health claims." 

But MaCRO’s collaborative model brings deep understanding of the populations they study, and takes into account the real-world context of their data. This remarkable multidisciplinary approach enables high-impact discoveries that contribute to multiple fields of research simultaneously. “Our two-generational perspective is crucial in informing our novel research questions and findings,” says Dr. Catherine Monk, a founding committee member of MaCRO and Division Chief of Women’s Mental Health in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. “And through our combined expertise, we can translate research outcomes into real-world change for both the parent and child generations.” 

“It’s unusual to have such successful initiatives at this scale that not only give us important data on the health of babies, children, and parents, but also meaningfully contribute to outcomes for families,” says Dr. Dumitriu. “The kind of interdisciplinary research we’re privileged to do here is really rare.”

Promoting Universal Family Health through Collaborative Science

The COMBO Initiative, which was incubated at MaCRO, is a particularly noteworthy example of how this kind of synergy can impact outcomes.

MaCRO architected a space where Pediatrics and Obstetrics are not only involved in the same projects, they have thriving studies and grants together. And thanks to its incubation under MaCRO, COMBO has been able to cultivate the kind of interdepartmental symbiosis rarely seen in institutional research. 

Led by Dr. Dumitriu, COMBO emerged from an early MaCRO working group, aiming to rapidly gather data on the pandemic’s effects on moms and babies. Because they’d united experts from both of these specialties right away, they were able to build that holistic understanding into the foundation of their research protocols, to facilitate meaningful interaction with the populations they study. And their nimble data translation changed families’ lives: 

When COMBO uncovered the revolutionary finding that mothers have an extremely low risk of transmitting Covid-19 to their infants, they were able to help reverse the precautionary pandemic hospital policy of separating mothers and babies. This had immediate impacts for those families by reuniting millions of moms and babies in the first hours and days of their lives together, which we know to be a critical time for both of their well-being. 

COMBO is a thriving illustration of what MaCRO set out to do. Comprehensively looking at moms, babies, and how they affect each other, COMBO quickly became a world-leading maternal-infant study. 5 years later, in response to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ and surgeon general’s calls, it has grown into the nation’s largest study of the wide spectrum of parent/caregiver-child relationships, to build the evidence base for the field of Early Relational Health. Through this expansion, COMBO’s model upholds the values upon which MaCRO was founded, partnering with a national pediatric network and family network collaborative to co-design this large-scale research in equal partnership with those who will be most impacted by it: clinicians and families. 

MaCRO’s selection as the inaugural team science award winner is “a testament to the team's dedication, expertise, and innovative approach to research.” It recognizes a groundbreaking model that champions interdepartmental collaborations to make exceptional contributions to the field of team science and, most importantly, to the lives of the populations they study. 

 

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