Dr. Chan’s lab seeks to design, test, and implement sustainable clinical and public health interventions to advance maternal and child health. Research interests focus on:
Dr. Chan is a co-founder of the HaSET Maternal and Child Health Research Program. She has led international collaborations with the World Health Organization (WHO) and Save the Children to develop and test models to scale up kangaroo mother care, an evidence-based intervention that reduces mortality among preterm and low birth weight babies up to 40%. These findings have influenced the recent global WHO guidelines on the care of preterm and low birth weight infants. Dr. Chan served as the epidemiology lead for a large-scale cohort study with 29,000 pregnant women and their newborns in seven low- and lower middle-income countries (LLMICs) to determine the epidemiology and patterns of antimicrobial resistance of neonatal sepsis. Results demonstrated that over 90% of neonatal sepsis isolates were resistant to first-line antibiotics and led to global and national programs on infection prevention and targeted antibiotic therapy. She is currently working on estimating the morbidity and mortality of women and young children globally. More details can be found at www.haset.org.
Dr. Chan is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. She completed her PhD and post-doctoral work at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a research fellowship at ICDDR, B. She trained in pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center in the Boston Combined Residency Program. Dr. Chan serves as an Attending Physician in the Division of Medical Critical Care. She is also an honorary faculty member at St Paul's Hospital Millennium Medical College, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She has mentored many talented students and fellows.
Around the world, five million children die each year before the age of 5, often in the first month of life. Dr. Grace Chan found this unacceptable. This is her story.