Maria E. Bleil

Maria Bleil, PhD, is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing. She is an affiliate faculty member at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology and a recent recipient of the Charles and Gerda Spence Endowed Professorship.

Dr. Bleil’s research focuses on early life adversity and its influence on developmental pathways that affect life course health and contribute to health disparities. Her work holds significant implications for identifying intervention areas to better manage risk in early life, particularly in promoting reproductive and cardiometabolic health.

Currently, Dr. Bleil leads a 30-year follow-up study of the landmark NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), in which children and their families were intensively studied from birth through adolescence. The SECCYD follow-up study has successfully located these now-adult participants, who are in their late 20s, to collect extensive social, behavioral, and health data. This data enables testing of the effects of early life adversity and the mechanisms behind these effects (e.g., pubertal timing) on long-term health and disease risk trajectories.

Additionally, Dr. Bleil leads a follow-up study of a recently completed randomized controlled trial (RCT) to assess whether the benefits of an attachment-focused intervention, Promoting First Relationships®, extend to the child's cardiometabolic health.

She is also a co-investigator on a study examining reproductive aging trajectories, focusing on how individual- and neighborhood-level exposures influence the acceleration of reproductive aging, the timing of menopause, and post-menopausal health.