University of Pennsylvania / Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Babette Zemel, PhD is a professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Director of the Nutrition and Growth Laboratory at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. She also serves as an editor of the Annals of Human Biology. Dr. Zemel received her PhD in Biological Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 after completing fieldwork in highland Papua New Guinea. She joined the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in 1991, where she has been conducting research and training in child growth for the past 30 years.
Her research program has two main goals. The first goal is to improve growth assessment. She has developed pediatric reference ranges for bone density, body composition, premature infants and children with Down syndrome. The second goal is to improve understanding of lifelong health and how it relates to childhood antecedents of physical growth and maturation, body composition, population ancestry/genetics, and lifestyle factors. Such understanding has public health implications for disease prevention and lifelong wellness, and also addresses concerns for children across a wide spectrum of chronic diseases who experience impaired growth, altered body composition and limitations in nutrition and physical activity. Her work is primarily focused on the development of bone fragility and obesity. Her research has advanced understanding of bone mineral accretion from early childhood through adulthood, and the effects of growth, muscle development, physical activity, diet and genetics on bone health during this critical life phase. She also investigates childhood body composition and health outcomes in the general population and in children with chronic diseases, including cystic fibrosis, Down syndrome, children with kidney disease, sickle cell disease, cardiac malformation, cancer survivors, inflammatory bowel disease and diabetes.
Saturday, November 5, 2022
3:30 PM – 5:30 PM ET