The Mount Sinai Child Health and Development Institute is organized around the principles of understanding, treating, and preventing diseases that represent critical health problems for an ever-growing number of children in New York and across the United States. These disease areas include asthma and allergies, obesity and diabetes, and learning disabilities, such as attention deficit disorder, autism, dyslexia, and a broad spectrum of neurodevelopmental disorders. Mount Sinai’s strong research programs and its access to a large pertinent population make this Institute particularly appealing to outstanding research faculty from around the world.

Mount Sinai ranks first among the New York’s academic medical centers in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants for pediatric research. Research areas of particular note include the molecular genetics of congenital heart disease, the developmental biology of liver and bile ducts, the pathophysiology of cholestatic liver disease, the factors affecting the progression of inherited kidney disease, the immunopathogenesis of food allergy, and the impact of the environment on children’s health. Mount Sinai’s vast resources and potential for philanthropic support and government funding, combined with the metropolitan area’s immediate medical and public health needs, position the Child Health and Developmental Institute to become one of the world’s leading centers of children’s health research.

The Institute is the outgrowth of collaborative work in two highly regarded and research-intensive departments at Mount Sinai: Pediatrics and Community and Preventive Medicine. Researchers in both departments have long recognized that children are not small adults. Children have unique vulnerabilities with no counterpart in adult life, and their biology and vulnerability to illness evolve as they mature from infancy to adolescence.