Catherine Monk
Originally trained as a clinical psychologist, in 2000 Monk completed her postdoctoral research studies in the Psychobiological Sciences at Columbia University via a National Institutes of Health (NIH) fellowship, joining the faculty at Columbia a year later. Monk’s research brings together the fields of perinatal psychiatry, developmental psychobiology, and neuroscience to focus on improving women’s well-being during pregnancy, as well as the earliest influences on children’s developmental trajectories – those that happen in utero to affect child outcomes. Monk is internationally recognized for her contributions to the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease Research model, as they relate to prenatal exposure to maternal stress and depression: in addition to shared genes and the postnatal environment, there is a third pathway for the familial inheritance of mental illness – factors in the prenatal environment. Most relevant to the CWP Forum on Maternal Health, she currently directs a NIH-NICHD-funded intervention study based on a novel protocol that she and colleagues developed – harnessing the child focus of the peripartum period, parenting skills, and CBT to help women at risk for depression. It is called: Preventing Postpartum Depression: A Dyadic Approach Adjunctive to Obstetric Care. Her research has been continuously funded by the NIH since her first support as a NIH ‘K’ Career Development Awardee in 2001 as well as by the March of Dimes, NARSAD, the Robin Hood Foundation, and Johnson & Johnson.
Biography current as of January 29, 2019