Laurie J. Bauman Ph.D.
Director of the Preventive Intervention Research Center
Professor of Pediatrics
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Email: laurie.bauman@einstein.yu.edu
Discipline: Sociology
Expertise: Child Health, Health Risks
Investigator Award 
Development of a Typology of Risk for Child Health: The Intersection of Social and Medical FactorsAward Year: 1999 Social and environmental factors have powerful effects on health status, utilization, and costs of care among children. Child health policy in the U.S., however, has focused primarily on biomedical determinants of health, ignoring most social risks. This project augments traditional biological risk factors such as previous access to health services and chronic illness used by policymakers. Drs. Stein and Bauman consider social risk factors, like poverty and parental mental illness, which contribute to child morbidity and the cost of delivering care. Their goal is to improve the ability of policymakers to predict short-term health outcomes (cost and utilization of care) and long-term health outcomes (health status and functioning). They: 1) conceptualize and define social and biomedical risks of children; 2) create independent measures for social and biomedical risk; 3) combine these into a typology that describes the risk experienced by children from the combination of biomedical and social factors; and 4) apply the typology to existing child health data sets.
Background 
Laurie J. Bauman is professor of pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and director of the Preventive Intervention Research Center. She has conducted multiple NIH-funded studies and randomized trials that applied sociological theory to the prevention of mental health problems secondary to physical conditions in children and their parents. She is currently principal investigator of three community-based randomized trials on HIV prevention with youth, and recently began an NIMH-funded study of adolescent couples to better understand how love, trust, expectations of monogamy, couple communication and relationship salience affect condom use. In September 2005 she received a 3-year grant from NCMHD to conduct community-based participatory research with adolescents as the lead decision makers. The adolescents will choose one health disparity, develop an intervention to reduce that disparity and pilot it in the community. Dr. Bauman was the 1991 recipient of the Lela Rowland award from the National Mental Health Association, Associate Editor of The Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, and currently serves on the planning board of the NIMH annual conference on the Role of Families in Preventing and Adapting to HIV/AIDS.
- Stein, R.E.K., Siegel, M.J., Bauman, L.J. Are Children of Moderately Low Birth Weight at Increased Risk for Poor Health? A New Look at an Old Question. Pediatrics, 2006, 118(1): 217-23.
- Bauman, L.J., Silver, E.J., Stein, R.E.K. Cumulative Social Disadvantage and Child Health. Pediatrics, 2006, 117(4): 1321-8.
- Stein, R.E., Silver, E.J., Bauman, L.J. Shortening the Questionnaire for Identifying Children with Chronic Conditions: What Is the Consequence? Pediatrics, 2001, 107(4): E61.