Biography

Dr Michelle Fernandes, MBBS MRCPCH DPhil (Oxon), is an academic neonatologist and neuroscientist based in the UK, with global collaborations across 18 countries. Her clinical and academic areas of interest are neonatal brain science and early child development, particularly during the first 1000 days of life. She is a MRC Clinical Research Training Fellow, Clinical Lecturer and Neonatal Medicine GRID Registrar at the Department of Paediatrics, University of Oxford, UK. She previously held similar appointments at the University of Southampton where she remains a visiting fellow. She is also an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, and a Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Nuffield Department of Women’s and Reproductive Health, at Oxford. She holds honorary appointments at the Windward Islands Research and Education Foundation, Grenada; the Caribbean Centre of Child Neurodevelopment; the University of Turku, Finland and UCL, London. She is the Director of Early Brain Science at the Oxford Maternal and Perinatal Health Institute. She is a practicing neonatologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford.

Michelle’s academic and clinical pursuits involve the adoption of a ‘whole-child’ approach to early child development, towards making a positive difference to the most vulnerable children, internationally, at risk of developmental delay. Michelle’s research focuses on: (i) understanding the interplay between factors affecting brain development during the first 1000 days of life; (ii) developing tools to better measure neurodevelopmental outcomes in young children, internationally and at scale, towards developing a universal surveillance system for the early detection of children at risk of developmental delays and (iii) evaluating scalable, family-centred interventions to promote/rescue early development. Clinically, her interests within neonatal medicine lie in neonatal brain science; the neurodevelopment follow-up of babies born preterm and in family-integrated approaches to optimising brain development outcomes in preterm babies and those with perinatal brain injury.

Currently, Michelle is involved with 18 child development focused research projects across 14 countries, with awards from the MRC, NIHR, NIH, USAID and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She has authored three novel, international neurodevelopment assessment tools (the INTER-NDA, OX-NDA and Neo-NBA) to identify developmental delay in young children at scale. Since 2012, she has worked closely with the INTERGROWTH-21st, the INTERBIO-21st and the INTERPRACTICE-21st Projects; leading on the construction of the first international prescriptive standards of early child development. Her most recent project, BRAINENDEVR, brings together comprehensive early life health, growth, development and environmental data on over 8,000 children from nine countries to develop an international estimator for clinical risk prediction of developmental delay at birth, 1 and 2 years of age.