Current Students and Staff

// University News

16 Oct 2015

New study to look at factors affecting child growth and development

Loughborough University has been awarded a grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to investigate the impact of ethnicity, social standing and economic situation on the growth and development of children and adolescents.

The study will form part of the Healthy Birth, Growth and Development knowledge integration (HBGDki) initiative.  This aims to extract insights from past and ongoing research funded by the Foundation, and others in the field, by pooling together data from individual studies that will be made available to qualified researchers.

This pooled data will be used to generate predictive models that measure the impact of actions to reduce the risk of malnutrition and infection/inflammation, as well as to improve gut function, during critical child growth and development stages.  It is hoped it will enable the development of effective targeted interventions to achieve better return on investment in child nutrition programs.

The Loughborough project will be led by Professor Barry Bogin and Dr Ines Varela-Silva from the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences and focus on data collected in Mexico and Guatemala.  They will be working with researchers from the Department of Human Ecology at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Merida, Mexico, and the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala.

Read the full press release for more information.