Dr. Merced-Nieves is a dually trained neuroscientist and environmental epidemiologist with expertise in early neurodevelopment and mixtures analysis. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor with a primary appointment in the Departments of Public Health at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She also serves as the Physiological Assessment Children’s Environmental Risk (PACER) laboratory Research Program Manager offering my expertise in neurocognitive and behavioral assessments to ascertain proper collection and analysis. Dr. Merced-Nieves has particular interest in investigating the impacts of prenatal and early life exposure to environmental factors on children’s brain and behavioral development in racially diverse and socioeconomically disadvantaged populations to inform efforts to address health disparities. During her postdoctoral fellowship, she worked under the mentorship of Drs. Robert O. Wright and Rosalind J. Wright; driven by the desire to study and understand the potential interactions between chemical and nonchemical environmental factors (the exposome) and their effects on children’s development. Dr. Merced-Nieves postdoctoral work focused on the association of prenatal exposure to metals and maternal stress, separately and jointly, on children’s behavioral development. Throughout her postdoctoral training, she developed advanced statistical skills to consider multiple environmental factors jointly, such as mixtures analysis [e.g., Weighted Quantile Sum (WQS) and Bayesian Kernel Machine Regression]. In her recent work using data collected in the prospective Programming of Intergenerational Stress Mechanisms (PRISM) study, she has continued to strengthen her statistical analysis capabilities. Her training on health disparities has been enhanced by recent projects examining the differential contributions of various maternal stress measures and psychological correlates in relation to child behavioral and respiratory outcomes, while also considering how these lived experiences vary across ethnoracial groups and identities. Dr. Merced-Nieves’s interest in sleep has developed in the context of her work to date being focused on metal effects on neurocognitive and psychological outcomes in early childhood, an increasing awareness of how closely these neurodevelopmental outcomes are tied to sleep problems, and the dearth of research on environmental influences on sleep programming in early life.
Dr. Merced-Nieves’s study titled Prenatal metal mixture, placental iodine stores, and child sleep outcomes aims to:
- Examine associations between exposure to prenatal urinary metals (Pb, As, Cd, and Mn) and early childhood sleep outcomes. We will examine the effects of prenatal exposure to metals, considered i) independently and as a ii) mixture, on child sleep outcomes.
- Examine whether metals and their mixture effects are modified by placental iodine status. We will explore whether cumulative placental iodine stores modify the effect of prenatal metal exposures on child sleep outcomes.
ConduITS is supported by NCATS of the NIH’s CTSA Program. Any use of CTSA-supported resources requires citation of grant number UL1TR004419 awarded to ISMMS in the acknowledgment section of every publication resulting from this support. Adherence to the NIH Public Access Policy is also required.
