Rachel S. Gross, MD

I am a general pediatrician, a clinical research investigator, and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital Center. My research centers on advancing the science of early child obesity prevention by:

• generating new knowledge about the behavioral, social, economic, and environmental factors that influence excessive weight gain in children and that increase the disparities in the rates of early child obesity
• developing and evaluating behavioral, social and environmental interventions to improve diet quality and reduce early behavioral patterns associated with obesity
• ultimately implementing and disseminating these innovative strategies to diverse economic and ethnic communities to achieve population level health outcomes

I am the co-project director for the USDA-funded Starting Early Program (StEP) randomized controlled trial, designed to test the efficacy of a primary care-based family-centered child obesity prevention program for low-income families beginning in the third trimester of pregnancy and continuing through child age 3 years; and for the innovative two-fold expansion of this approach into early pregnancy and the preschool years. My research has aimed to systematically describe relationships between poverty-related social determinants of health, child feeding, and child obesity. Using mixed-method approaches, My work addresses three salient domains of social determinants of health: material hardships, low human capital and high psychosocial stressors. These findings aid in conceptualizing, developing and tailoring obesity prevention strategies to directly address poverty-related barriers to intervention success and to improve intervention effectiveness. 

Related to COVID-19 research, I serve as mPI for the Clinical Science Core (CSC) of RECOVER (Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery), which is a large multi-site NIH-funded national initiative to better understand the Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection. In this role, I lead the RECOVER Pediatric Observational Cohort Study, to determine the prevalence of Long COVID in children, to characterized Long COVID symptoms across age groups, to identify risk and resilience factors associated with developing Long COVID symptoms, and to study the long-term impacts of Long COVID on child development and other organ systems.

I also serve as mPI on an NICHD-funded R01 to determine whether healthcare- and community-based parenting interventions initially targeting pathways of adversity for families with young children living in poverty can prevent widening of disparities in the context of COVID-19, by pooling and harmonizing seven data sets across four studies in New York City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Flint, Michigan.