The HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study
The HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study is one of the largest and most ambitious investigations of early brain development ever undertaken in the United States. Supported through the NIH HEAL Initiative and a partnership among multiple NIH Institutes and Centers, HBCD aims to follow 6,000 families from pregnancy through early childhood across 25 research sites to understand how biological, environmental, and social experiences shape children's health and development.
As Contact Principal Investigator for the Oklahoma HBCD site, Dr. Croff leads a multidisciplinary team conducting participant recruitment, longitudinal data collection, and consortium-wide scientific initiatives. The Oklahoma team has developed innovative approaches for engaging pregnant people and new families, including those living in rural communities and those affected by substance use, to ensure that populations often underrepresented in research are represented in one of the nation's most important child development studies.
HBCD combines advanced neuroimaging, biospecimen collection, developmental assessments, and detailed measures of family, environmental, and community context to better understand how prenatal exposures, stress, adversity, and early experiences influence brain development and lifelong health. This comprehensive approach provides an unprecedented opportunity to identify factors that promote resilience and improve outcomes for future generations.
Beyond local data collection, Dr. Croff contributes to consortium-wide scientific leadership, including the development of biospecimen protocols that strengthen investigations of genetic, epigenetic, and metabolic pathways, and collaborative research that advances study implementation across the national consortium.
Impact
Helping define how prenatal experiences shape brain development while advancing national standards for participant engagement, biospecimen science, and longitudinal research in one of the largest child development studies ever conducted.
Selected Publications
