Dani Dumitriu, MD, PhD

During the last century, medicine has made unprecedented progress in the treatment of disease, with significantly less effort devoted to the prevention of disease. Stressful life events, particularly during critical developmental periods, have been linked to increased risk of virtually all diseases. Notably, even in the presence of the most severe stressors, some individuals remain resistant to the development of stress-induced pathology. Identifying the neurobiological basis for this natural resiliency holds enormous potential for developing universal preventive strategies to strengthen resiliency circuits. Dr. Dumitriu’s long-term vision is developing actionable clinical change to nudge developmental trajectories toward resilience at the population level.

To investigate how stress and resilience become developmentally embedded and drive individual and relational outcomes, Dr. Dumitriu leads the Developmental Origins of Resilience (DOOR) Lab. Using state-of-the-art in vivo and ex vivo tools in animal models, the lab probes neural mechanisms of: individual variability in stress-responses to social and non-social stressors, developmental trajectories following early-life stressors, and autonomic synchrony as a potential protective factor. She conducts parallel analyses during human mother-infant interactions. Committed to collaboratively developing new tools and furthering the #openscience movement, the DOOR lab developed MouseCircuits.org, an open science repository of chemogenetic and optogenetic circuit dissection for the neuroscience community.

Dr. Dumitriu also chairs the COMBO Initiative: a world-leading clinical study of maternal-infant/child health that has generated an unprecedented foundational dataset on mothers and babies since early 2020. Thanks to its groundbreaking advancements in multidisciplinary, dyadic, and pediatric research, COMBO evolved into the Center for Early Relational Health (CERH), with Dr. Dumitriu as its inaugural director.

As the academic hub of excellence for the science of early childhood relationships, CERH dedicates a major portion of its focus to uncovering the mechanisms of: how strong, supportive early relationships form; under what conditions they develop; and what they predict about childhood health. Building this foundational understanding of ERH is an essential step toward innovating and scaling much-needed dyadic interventions that promote strong relationships as early as possible and embedding evidence-based primary prevention into universal pediatric care.

To that end, CERH leads the clinical research for COMBO National: a nationwide expansion of the original COMBO study, in exclusive partnership with Reach Out and Read (the nonprofit organization leading its implementation research). This cornerstone ERH study is the first to look at all known constructs (and some as-of-yet unidentified constructs) of parent/caregiver-child relationships and how they map onto lifecourse outcomes. COMBO National is co-designed in partnership with the parents and pediatric care practitioners it serves.