Swetland Seminar | Mom as the Infant's Environment

Swetland Seminar | Mom as the Infant's Environment There is a lot of interest in understanding a lifetime's environmental exposures to assess risk of disease, but an infant's exposures are intimately connected to its mother's exposures. During pregnancy, mother and fetus share a blood supply, transferring needed nutrients, immune cells, hormones, and growth factors, but also environmental toxins, medications, and xenobiotics to the developing baby. After birth, the breastfed infant benefits from a highly digestible and perfectly formulated diet of human milk, but here, too, mom's exposures can influence the composition of her milk. Further, these exposures are not evenly distributed and a wide range of factors, including maternal metabolic health, neighborhood material deprivation, and family demographics can have an impact on maternal exposures and child health outcomes. This talk will explore how we look at maternal transfer of positive and negative exposures, ongoing research into these exposures and how the science is evolving to allow us to consider a wide definition of environment. Presenter: Shannon Conrey, PhD, MS Assistant Professor, Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, School of Medicine Core Faculty, Mary Ann Swetland Center for Environmental Health Faculty Associate, Schubert Center for Child Studies Case Western Reserve University September 15, 2026