An interview with David Barker
David Barker, M.D., Ph.D., FRS was a Physician and Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Southampton, U.K. and Professor in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Oregon Health and Science University, U.S. Twenty years ago, he showed for the first time that people who had low birth weight are at greater risk of developing coronary heart disease. In 1995, the British Medical Journal named this this “Barker Hypothesis.” It is now widely accepted. In 2003, he joined Professor Kent Thornburg at the faculty at the Heart Research Center, OHSU, to study how nutrition and growth before birth and during early childhood alter the development of the heart.
This interview – which was conducted by Michael Lu, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Public Health at UCLA, and Jessica Chow, MPH, Research Associate at the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities – is the second in a series of interviews with national and international experts in life course health development.
