The Feihe Pediatric Brain Development Research Initiative at Boston Children’s Hospital, a Harvard Medical School Teaching Hospital aims to improve the outlook for children everywhere by gaining a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that drive healthy brain development. The initiative grants funds to Boston Children’s Hospital researchers working on projects focused on the genetic, nutritional, and environmental impacts of brain development during the prenatal and postnatal periods.
On April 4, 2025, Boston Children’s faculty and leadership from Feihe gathered for the first annual Feihe Pediatric Brain Development Symposium to learn more from this year’s awardees and hospital leaders.
The 2025 awardees and projects are:
- Jonathan Lipton, MD, PhD (Siddharth Srivastava, MD and Joe Kossowsky, PhD, MMsc): A paradigm for bench-to-bedside determination of circadian susceptibilities to neurodevelopmental regression in Kleefstra Syndrome
- Brian Kalish, MD: Mother’s Microbiome and Intrauterine Neurodevelopment: Defining Mechanisms of Early Life Programing
- Hisashi Umemori, MD, PhD: Activity-dependent development of dopaminergic synapses and its alterations by the environment
- Zhigang He, PhD, BM (Hisashi Umemori, MD, PhD and Chinfei Chen, MD, PhD): Investigating the role of postnatal triiodothyronine (T3) surge in brain maturation and regeneration control
- Takao Hensch, PhD: Mitigating early adversity impacts on male social behavior by whole-brain analysis
- Maria Lehtinen, PhD: Cerebrospinal fluid repair to prevent neurodevelopmental disorders
- Caitlin Rollins, MD, SM: Normative Metrics for Fetal Brain MRI in a Nationally Representative Sample
Boston Children’s Hospital is grateful to Feihe for their generous commitment to advance this important work. Feihe, headquartered in Beijing, China, is the largest and most highly recognized Chinese brand infant milk formula company, according to the Frost & Sullivan (F&S) Report.
If you would like to connect with any of the awardees or learn more about the initiative overall, please reach out to media.relations@childrens.harvard.edu. You can find a link to footage and images from the symposium HERE.