Kaja Lewinn, ScD

Kaja LeWinn, Sc.D., is an epidemiologist and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Child and Adolescent Division at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. LeWinn attained her doctorate in Social Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health and completed fellowships through the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program and the Clinical Services Research Training Program at UCSF. Dr. LeWinn takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the influence of social context on cognitive and socioemotional development during childhood and adolescence. The overarching goal of Dr. LeWinn’s research is to integrate approaches from neuroscience, psychology, and epidemiology to generate generalizable and replicable findings about the experiences in early life that shape risk for psychopathology in pediatric populations experiencing high levels of adversity. She conducts this work at several levels of analysis, which include 1) longitudinal, epidemiological cohort studies of pediatric populations that allow for generalizable knowledge about the role of social context in shaping early cognitive and socioemotional skills, and 2) large, neuroimaging studies to better understand the neural underpinnings of socioemotional development. She plays a major leadership role in three large cohort studies focused on neurodevelopmental outcomes. She is Co-Scientific Director of a longitudinal birth cohort study of over 1,500 women and their children (the Conditions Affecting Neurocognitive Development and Early Learning study- CANDLE) designed to understand the links between early life adversity and cognitive and socioemotional development in early childhood. She is an M-PI of PATHWAYS, a birth cohort study that combines the CANDLE study with two additional extant cohorts funded by the NIH Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) initiative. PATHWAYS is focused on understanding the combined impact of chemical (e.g. phthalates, air pollution) and non-chemical (e.g. psychosocial) stressors during pregnancy on child neurodevelopment and asthma outcomes in a combined cohort of 3,500 mother-child dyads. She is Co-PI of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded cohort study in Flint, Michigan designed to assess the impact of lead exposure during the Flint water crisis on child cognitive and socioemotional outcomes.