Grace Chan

Professor Chan's research focuses on advancing maternal newborn and child health by using epidemiological methods to discover and deliver evidence-based interventions.

Professor Chan studies the causes of maternal and child mortality, stillbirths, and preterm birth. In partnership with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute, she leads HaSET (“happiness” in Amharic), a program for maternal and child health research in Ethiopia. With colleagues at St. Paul’s Hospital Millennium Medical College, her team established a health and demographic surveillance system in rural Ethiopia to better understand the causes of maternal and child morbidity and mortality.

Research projects focus on understanding the etiologies of neonatal sepsis, antimicrobial resistance patterns among pregnant women and their newborns, and mechanisms for adverse birth outcomes. Collaborating with the World Health Organization, she is developing strategies to accelerate effective implementation of Kangaroo Mother Care for preterm newborns and designing studies to develop modified antibiotic regimens for hospitalized newborns. She has evaluated newborn survival projects and trained health care workers on essential newborn care practices in India, Indonesia, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. Professor Chan was an NIH Clinical Research Scholar at Johns Hopkins where she collaborated with the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research in Bangladesh to estimate the risk of early-onset neonatal sepsis from maternal infections in Dhaka.