Mandy Brown Belfort

Mandy Brown Belfort, MD MPH is a neonatologist and epidemiologist in the Department of Pediatric Newborn Medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Her research is focused on the influence of early-life nutritional exposures on health and developmental outcomes later in life. Her work has emphasized the NICU hospitalization as a critical window of opportunity for effective nutritional interventions. She has a particular interest in human milk and breastfeeding and has identified long-lasting neurodevelopmental benefits of associate with maternal milk-based diets for both full term and very preterm infant populations. She also has an interest in the determinants of cardio metabolic risk among children and adults born very preterm. Current studies address nutritional challenges specific to human milk-fed very preterm infants.  Dr. Belfort’s research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and other organizations. Her work has been published widely in peer-reviewed journals and informs both public health recommendations for breastfeeding and clinical nutritional approaches within neonatal intensive care.