.png)
Assistant Professor
Institute for Global Nutrition, University of California, Davis
Dr. Prado is an Associate Professor in the University of California Davis Department of Nutrition and Institute for Global Nutrition. She leads the Translational Research in Early Life Learning for Impact at Scale (TRELLIS) Lab. Like a vine, children need nurturing care and strong support structures to ensure their healthy growth and development to their full potential. Parents and caregivers are like the gardeners that tend and nurture the vine so that it can grow and flourish. Policies and programs, from the national to community level, are like the trellis that supports the vine to grow. With collaborators across the globe, her aim in the TRELLIS lab is to apply findings from basic science on the effects of nutrition and other environmental factors on brain development to conduct research informing how policies and programs can best support parents and caregivers in their vital work of providing the nurturing care children need to thrive. Her research approaches include (1) evaluating the developmental outcomes of efficacy, effectiveness, and impact evaluations, (2) longitudinal cohort studies, (3) systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and (4) evaluating and advancing neurobehavioral and developmental assessment methods in low-resource contexts.