Kimberly G Noble
· Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child and Parent Development and EducationColumbia University · Curriculum & Teaching
Active 1994–2026
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About
Kimberly G. Noble is the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child and Parent Development and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a neuroscientist and board-certified pediatrician who directs the Neurocognition, Early Experience and Development (NEED) lab. Her research focuses on how socioeconomic inequality relates to children's cognitive, emotional, and brain development across infancy, childhood, and adolescence. She is particularly interested in understanding how disparities develop early in infancy or toddlerhood, the modifiable environmental factors that contribute to these disparities, and how this research can inform intervention strategies. Dr. Noble has received funding from NIH and various foundations and is a principal investigator of the 'Baby's First Years' clinical trial, which assesses the causal impact of income on children’s development in the first three years of life. She completed her undergraduate, graduate, and medical degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, and her residency in pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center. Her work has garnered international attention and numerous awards, including the 2017 Association for Psychological Science Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions and the 2021 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest. She is an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and has…
Research topics
- Psychology
- Medicine
- Developmental psychology
- Economic growth
- Economics
- Psychiatry
- Environmental health
- Political Science
- Demography
- Geography
Selected publications
The impact of a poverty reduction intervention on infant brain activity
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 287 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingSignificance This study demonstrates the causal impact of a poverty reduction intervention on early childhood brain activity. Data from the Baby’s First Years study, a randomized control trial, show that a predictable, monthly unconditional cash transfer given to low-income families may have a causal impact on infant brain activity. In the context of greater economic resources, children’s experiences changed, and their brain activity adapted to those experiences. The resultant brain activity pat…
JAMA Pediatrics · 2022 · 285 citations
Importance: Associations between in utero exposure to maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection and neurodevelopment are speculated, but currently unknown. Objective: To examine the associations between maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy, being born during the COVID-19 pandemic regardless of maternal SARS-CoV-2 status, and neurodevelopment at age 6 months. Design, Setting, and Participants: A cohort of infants exposed to maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy and unexposed controls was e…
PEDIATRICS · 2021 · 104 citations
1st authorCorrespondingChildhood economic disadvantage is associated with lower cognitive and social-emotional skills, reduced educational attainment, and lower earnings in adulthood. Despite these robust correlations, it is unclear whether family income is the cause of differences observed between children growing up in poverty and their more fortunate peers or whether these differences are merely due to the many other aspects of family life that co-occur with poverty. Baby's First Years is the first randomized contr…
Infants of mothers with higher physiological stress show alterations in brain function
Developmental Science · 2020 · 53 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingChronic stress has been increasingly linked with aberrations in children's behavioral, cognitive, and social development, yet the effect of chronic physiological stress on neural development during the first year of life is largely unknown. The present study aims to link a physiological index of chronic stress (maternal hair cortisol concentration) to maturational differences in infant functional brain development during the first year of life. Participants were 94 mother-infant dyads. To index…
Infancy · 2022 · 35 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingWe investigated how exogenous variation in exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic during the first year of life is related to infant development, maternal mental health, and perceived stress. Ninety-three socioeconomically diverse pregnant women were recruited before the pandemic to participate in a longitudinal study. Infants ranged in age at the beginning of lockdown (0-9.5 months old), thus experiencing different durations of pandemic exposure across the first year of life. The duration of pandemi…
Recent grants
Socioeconomic Disparities in Cognitive and Neural Development in the First 3 years
NIH · $2.5M · 2018–2025
Household Income and Child Development in the First Years of Life
NIH · $12.9M · 2017–2028
Frequent coauthors
- 30 shared
Lisa A. Gennetian
- 27 shared
Nathan A. Fox
- 26 shared
Katherine Magnuson
- 25 shared
Hirokazu Yoshikawa
- 23 shared
William P. Fifer
- 22 shared
Greg J. Duncan
- 20 shared
Emily C. Merz
Colorado State University
- 20 shared
Xiaofu He
Columbia University
Labs
Education
B.A., Biological Basis of Behavior
University of Pennsylvania
Ph.D., Neuroscience
University of Pennsylvania
M.D.
University of Pennsylvania
Other, Pediatrics
New York Presbyterian Hospital / Columbia University Medical Center
Awards & honors
- 2017 Association for Psychological Science Janet Taylor Spen…
- 2021 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguis…
- Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science
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