Michelle Lampl, MD, PhD

Director, Emory Center for the Study of Human Health, Co-Director, Emory Predictive Health Institute, Atlanta, GA

  1. United States

Biography

Michelle Lampl PhD, MD is recognized for strategic leadership creating innovative, collaborative education and research programs in human health. Building on her work with the University’s strategic framework team in predictive health, she launched a nexus for cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional collaboration, the Center for the Study of Human Health.  The Center brings together students and researchers from the far-reaching resources of the University’s undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools with health leaders from partner and neighboring academic, governmental, and non-governmental institutions.  Together, these scholars and professionals offer unique educational opportunities building the science of health.

A physician-scientist, Dr. Lampl’s body of research includes the emerging disciplines of Predictive Health, Developmental Origins of Health, and the overall study of human growth and development. Her landmark scientific work established the saltatory nature of growth—confirming that humans grow intermittently, not continuously. Her current work centers on the mechanisms of growth and investigates the nutritional, immunological and hormonal networks that interact with behavior to influence the growth process. Elements of Dr. Lampl’s work are featured in the current Netflix documentary series, Babies, and in a new Coursera course, The Origins of Health, launching in 2021.

Dr. Lampl is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Human Health and the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. She has been a recipient of the Emory Williams Award for Outstanding Teaching, the Emory University Exemplary Teacher award, and she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

MD, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
PhD, Anthropology University of Pennsylvania
BA, University of Pennsylvania

Recent Publications

  1. Lampl, M. (2020). Infant Physical Growth In The Cambridge Handbook of Infant Development. Lockman J.J. and Tamis-LeMonda C.S. (Eds). Pp 40-69. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, U.K. 

  2. Lampl, M. (2018). Implications of Growth as a Time-Specific Event. In Recent Research in Nutrition and Growth (Vol. 89, pp. 1-11). Karger Publishers. 

  3. Mummert, A., Schoen, M., & Lampl, M. (2018). Growth and life course health development. In Handbook of Life Course Health Development (pp. 405-429). Springer, Cham.

  4. Lampl, M., & Schoen, M. (2017). How long bones grow children: Mechanistic paths to variation in human height growth. American Journal of Human Biology, 29(2), e22983.

  5. Lampl, M., Mummert, A., & Schoen, M. (2016). The lived experience of growing. In Biological Measures of Human Experience across the Lifespan (pp. 47-66). Springer, Cham.

View all publications: PubMed, Google Scholar, ResearchGate

Research Expertise

  • The science of saltatory growth spurts

  • Fetal growth and implications for lifelong health

  • Growth models and methods for human growth research