News & Updates

Dr. Cathy Spong became NICHD’s acting director on October 1, 2015. Here she shares her plans for the year and her thoughts on what makes NICHD so unique.

In his recent article in The Huffington Post, Dr. Guttmacher highlights the importance of reading every day with children.

Children learn to read by building a number of skills. Learn more about how reading works in this slideshow.

The Cincinnati MR Imaging of Neurodevelopment (C-MIND) study was launched in 2009 to establish a new resource for the research community: a database of scans showing the structure and activity of the growing brain. C-MIND has taken an unprecedented look at what’s going on inside the heads of hundreds of kids from ages 0 to 18.

NICHD supports a variety of research projects and networks that are useful to neuroscientists. Find a detailed list here.

Countless factors, from family and environment to genes and biology, influence a child’s growth and development. Scientists in the NICHD’s Section on Child and Family Research study how these factors affect the physical, mental, and social development of growing children, along with their health and well-being.

The National Institutes of Health is making funding awards of $35 million over the next five years to support the Centers for Collaborative Research in Fragile X program. Investigators at these centers will seek to better understand Fragile X-associated disorders and work toward developing effective treatments.

A recent survey shows that one in four young children (ages birth to 5) are at moderate to high risk for developmental, behavioral, or social delays.1 To raise awareness of these risks and promote early screening, the NICHD has joined the Administration for Children and Families and a number of other federal partners in launching Birth to 5: Watch Me Thrive!

Preschool educational interventions have long been studied for their value in preparing children for school. Recent studies, however, indicate that these interventions might do much more, possibly affecting social and emotional skills later in life, and even adult physical health.

Learning is easier when it only requires nerve cells to rearrange existing patterns of activity than when the nerve cells have to generate new patterns, a study of monkeys has found. The scientists explored the brain’s capacity to learn through recordings of electrical activity of brain cell networks. The study was partly funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Anyone who deals with young children knows that kids act up—and act out—from time to time. But some kids have more trouble than others when it comes to controlling their impulses. Now researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have uncovered an important clue to the thought processes underlying some children’s persistent problem behavior.

Head Start is a program which provides low-income children with preschool education, health care, and nutrition services. A recent analysis of a national study on Head Start shows that 1 year of the program improves children’s math, literacy, and vocabulary skills.

Alfred Nobel once said, “The observation of and the search for similarities and differences are the basis of all human knowledge.” For some NICHD-supported researchers, this search for similarities led in an unexpected direction.

Twenty percent of children in the United States grow up in rural communities, often experiencing higher rates of poverty and geographic isolation. Poverty is known to be stressful for young children and is associated with poor developmental outcomes. These effects can start to appear as early as 15 months of age. But the how and why—what scientists call the “mechanisms”—that lead to these poor outcomes have remained largely unknown.

At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience , held in San Diego, California, from November 9–13, more than 30,000 neuroscientists from around the world will share their latest research results and learn about new advances and opportunities in the field.

Dr. Brett Miller spoke with NICHD grantee Dr. Tom Mitchell, on using computers to recognize spoken words by analyzing the brain activity patterns of listeners.

Dr. Lisa Freund, Ph.D., has been named the new Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch, as announced in an email from Dr. Catherine Spong, M.D., Director of the Division of Extramural Research.

Children who failed to acquire a basic math skill in first grade scored far behind their peers by seventh grade on a test of the mathematical abilities needed to function in adult life, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers at Indiana University recently tested a three-dimensional computerized device to help train children with DCD to perform manual actions.

On December 5, 2012, the NICHD released the Scientific Vision: The Next Decade, the culmination of a collaborative process that began in 2011 to identify the most promising scientific opportunities for the Institute and the research community to pursue over the next decade. The Vision statement was made available during the NICHD’s 50th anniversary colloquium.