Elsie M. Taveras, MD, MPH is Chief of the Division of General Pediatrics and Director of Pediatric Population Health Management at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is also Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She received her BS and MD degrees from New York University. After receiving her MD, she did her internship, residency, and chief residency, at the Boston Combined Residency Program in Pediatrics. Dr. Taveras also holds a Master_s in Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Dr. Taveras is a Pediatrician and a childhood obesity researcher. Her main focus of research is understanding determinants of obesity in women and children and developing interventions across the life course to prevent obesity, especially in underserved populations. Her work spans the spectrum of observational studies and interventions to identify and quantify risk factors to modify these risk factors for health promotion and disease prevention. She has published over 100 research studies and served on Committees for the Institutes of Medicine to develop recommendations for prevention of obesity in early life and for evaluating the progress of national obesity prevention efforts. Her work has been cited by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as one of the most influential studies of 2010 and was cited in the White House Task Force Report on Childhood Obesity in May 2010.