Professional Summary and Publications

Prof. Debarati Mukherjee's research in maternal and child health spans three interconnected domains: early childhood development, maternal influences on child outcomes, and the nutritional, psychosocial, and environmental determinants of child neurodevelopment and mental health.

An early thread of her work has been the development and validation of scalable digital tools for neurodevelopmental assessment in low-resource settings in collaboration with Dr. Supriya Bhavnani’s team at Sangath, New Delhi. Their proof-of-concept study on DEEP (Developmental Assessment on an E-Platform) demonstrated the feasibility of gamified cognitive assessment in rural Indian preschool children, and a subsequent longitudinal validation study confirmed that non-specialist workers can reliably administer the tool - a significant advance for community-based child health surveillance in LMICs. Complementing this, her systematic review of digital tools for autism risk detection in early childhood provided a comprehensive evidence base for technology-driven approaches to early identification of neurodevelopmental disorders.

Her current work on the COINCIDE study – a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance-funded study examining nutritional, psychosocial, and environmental determinants of neurodevelopment and child mental health in urban Bangalore and rural Rewari - has generated important insights into early caregiving contexts that impact children's neurodevelopment and mental health outcomes. Published work from this program has documented contextual factors shaping caregiving in urban poor neighbourhoods, the influence of home-learning environments on cognitive and academic outcomes in young children, and the role of fathers in caregiving. A nested case-control study within the MAASTHI cohort additionally found that maternal depressive symptoms were associated with global developmental delay at one year of age, directly linking maternal mental health to infant mental health outcomes.

Her research also extends to maternal health and pregnancy outcomes. As part of the ICMR-SPIC Consortium, she contributed to a large pooled cohort study (>2 lakh pregnancies), estimating the prevalence of stillbirth and its risk factors across India. She also contributed to a pooled data analysis on anaemia burden across Indian cohort studies. Her NIH-D43 COALESCE fellowship focused on maternal influences on stress pathway development during infancy - an area that directly informs her current ICMR-funded "Womb to World" prospective cohort study examining maternal mental health, infant stress responses, and child emotional-behavioural outcomes in urban poor communities in India. Across this body of work, Dr. Mukherjee has consistently pursued a life course approach integrating biological, behavioural, and structural determinants of maternal and child health in India and the Global South.