Dr. Andrea Edlow, MD, MSc is an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School and a Maternal-Fetal Medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr Edlow’s laboratory focuses on the effects of maternal obesity and maternal immune activation on fetal brain development and offspring behavior, and how these effects are modified by fetal sex. Her lab was one of the first to use amniotic fluid supernatant and umbilical cord blood to investigate real-time fetal brain development in obese human pregnancy. Gene expression profiling of these two biofluids identified abnormal gene expression signatures in fetuses of obese women, highlighting dysregulated brain development and increased inflammation. More recently, Dr Edlow has used high-dimensional biological techniques (e.g. scRNA-seq) to investigate the brain-placenta connection and how fetoplacental immune activation may impact or predict fetal brain development.