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Academic Clinical Lecturer & MRC Clinical Research Training Fellow in Paediatrics
University of Southhamptom, United Kingdom
Dr Michelle Fernandes, MBBS, MRCPCH, DPhil(Oxon)
Dr Fernandes is a neonatologist and researcher in international early child development (ECD). She holds a Medical Research Council (MRC) Clinical Research Fellowship at the MRC’s Lifecourse Epidemiology Centre, an Academic Clinical Lecturership at the University of Southampton and a Senior Honorary Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford.
Her research focuses on (i) understanding the interplay between factors affecting brain development during the first 1000 days of life, (ii) developing tools to better measure ECD, internationally and at scale, towards developing a universal surveillance system for the early detection of delays and (3) evaluating scalable, family-centred interventions to promote/rescue ECD. Her research applies a ‘whole-child approach’ to brain development during the first 1000 days of life.
Over the past decade, she has been involved with 17 ECD research projects spanning 21 research groups across 14 countries, with research awards from the NIHR and MRC (UK); NIH, USAID and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (USA); and ICMR (India). Dr Fernandes has served as a technical advisor to the WHO’s ECD Initiative, and the Gates’ Foundation HBGD Knowledge Initiative. She has authored three novel ECD tools: the Neo-NDA, the OX-NDA©TM and the INTER-NDA©; the latter have been applied in over 15,000 children from 14 countries. She led the construction of the first international ECD standards, complementing the INTERGROWTH-21st fetal and the WHO child growth standards.
Following undergraduate medical training in India, she completed a DPhil in Child Psychiatry at Oxford (2011) for which she was awarded the Clarendon Fund, Exeter Kokil Pathak and Wingate Scholarships. This was followed by a post-doctoral research fellowship (Oxford, 2012-2015) with the INTERGROWTH-21st Project and INTERBIO-21st Study; and NIHR funded Academic Clinical and Career Track Fellowships (Southampton, 2016-2021). In 2021 she was awarded a prestigious MRC Fellowship. She is also a Research Fellow at WINDREF, Grenada and at the University of Turku, Finland, and serves on the editorial committee of Archives of Diseases in Childhood.