Elsie M. Taveras

Elsie M. Taveras, M.D., M.P.H. is Chief of the Division of General Academic Pediatrics and Director of Pediatric Population Health Management at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is also the Conrd Taff Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She received her Bachelor of Science and MD degrees from New York University. After receiving her MD, she did her internship, residency, and chief residency, at the Boston Combined Residency Program at Boston Children's Hospital and Boston Medical Center in Pediatrics. Dr. Taveras also holds a Master's in Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Taveras is a Pediatrician and a childhood obesity researcher. Her main focus of research is understanding determinants of obesity in women and children and developing interventions across the lifecourse to prevent obesity and chronic diseases, especially in underserved populations. Her work spans the spectrum of observational studies and interventions-to identify and quantify risk factors- and to modify these risk factors for health promotion and disease prevention. She has published over 150 research studies and served on Committees for the National Academy of Medicine to develop recommendations for prevention of obesity in early life and for evaluating the progress of national obesity prevention efforts. Her work in early life origins of childhood obesity was cited by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as one of the most influential studies of 2010 and in the White House Task Force Report on Childhood Obesity in May 2010.

She has received extensive research funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the American Diabetes Association, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Boston Foundation, among many other federal and foundation sources. In 2016, she received the Public Health Leadership in Medicine Award from the Massachusetts Association of Public Health for her extensive work improving health and health care in community-based settings.