CLS associate professor receives prize for exceptional research

CLS associate professor Gabriella Conti has been named one of the winners of the 2019 Philip Leverhulme Prizes.

The Philip Leverhulme Prizes recognise the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising.

Thirty prize winners have been recognised across the subject areas of archaeology, chemistry, economics, engineering, geography, and languages and literatures. Each of the 30 prize winners receives £100,000 which can be used over two or three years to advance their research. Dr Conti was a winner in the economics category.

Dr Conti is co-investigator on the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) in the IOE’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies. Her research draws on biomedical and social sciences fields with the aim of understanding the developmental origins of health inequalities, and the behavioural and biological pathways through which early life conditions affect health throughout people’s life course.

She is currently working on projects on the health effects of early life interventions, both in humans and in nonhuman primates; on the importance of prenatal investments and fetal development for long-term outcomes; and on the effects of health insurance on health in developing countries.

Earlier this year, Dr Conti received the Nick Hales Award from the International Society for Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD), awarded every two years to “a young and emerging investigator who has made an outstanding scientific contribution to the DOHaD field”. Gabriella is also a recent recipient of a five-year European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Award for her project ‘The developmental origins of health: Biology, shocks, investments, and policies’.

This news article first appeared on the UCL IoE website, 14 October 2019