Dr. Leslie Davidson's primary research interests are disability in children; international child health, screening, and epidemiology; and prevention of accidents and violence, particularly intimate partner violence. She has worked in an international team that developed an efficient approach to screen children for disability in developing countries (The TQ)and, for five years, led the Central Harlem School Health Program, launching childhood injury surveillance in Northern Manhattan linked to the development and evaluation of the Harlem Hospital Injury Prevention Program. Dr. Davidson moved to England in 1992 to work in the National Health Service as Pediatric Epidemiologist in the South East Thames Region and in Southeast London and was senior lecturer in Pediatric Epidemiology and Public Health at King's College, London. In 1997 she became director of the National Pediatric Epidemiology Unit at Oxford, where she studied the follow-up of at-risk neonates, the organization of maternity care and investigated how health services can best assist women experiencing intimate partner violence. She returned to Columbia's Mailman School in 2002 as chair of the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health. She is currently a senior member of the Department of Epidemiology, director of the newly emerging Center for Child and Family Life Epidemiology. She is senior health advisor to Project THRIVE of the NCCP and directs the dating violence program of the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence as well as chairs the Doctoral Committee in Epidemiology.
