Monday, June 12, 2023, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Michelle Lampl, Professor and Director of Emory Center for the Study of Human Health; Co-Director of the Emory-Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute

“The Emerging Science Behind Our Children’s Growth Spurts”

For more than a century doctors and scholars accepted that children grew like the charts on pediatricians’ walls: slowly and consistently, a little bit every day. These graphs became an iconic model for the biology of how healthy children should grow.

This is not, however, either a correct representation of growth biology or the experience of children, who grow erratically and in tandem with other biological episodes in health. Science has lagged behind the observations of generations of wise observers. Grandmothers’ adage that “children wake up taller after a fever” was not recognized for what it truly represented. We will take a look at data providing insights into this emerging science.