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CSDE Research Areas:

• Environments and Populations
• Health of People and Populations
• Wellbeing of Families and Households

In the News:

• Childhood Adversity as a Contributor to Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease (4/5/2021)
• Congratulations to the Best Poster Award Winners! (12/17/2020)
• CSDE Welcomes New Affiliates! (11/9/2018)
• CSDE’s Spring Quarter Seminar Series Finalized! (3/23/2021)
• Bleil Receives R01 Grant from NIH! (6/25/2021)
• New Paper from Bleil & Colleagues Assesses the Connection Between Excess Weight, Activity Levels, and Physical Performance Among Children (4/29/2022)

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Maria Bleil, Ph.D. is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Child, Family and Population Health Nursing. Dr. Bleil’s research takes a life course perspective in studying how individual- and environmental-level factors affect the timing and course of major reproductive events such as puberty and menopause as well as how such events shape trajectories of risk for chronic disease development, especially related to cardio-metabolic disease. This work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. Currently, Dr. Bleil is the principal investigator of two NIH-funded grants. The first grant is testing a life course model in which pubertal timing/tempo is hypothesized to play a mechanistic role in linking early life adversity and adulthood health. The second grant is examining environmental risk factors for accelerated reproductive aging, leading to earlier onset menopause. It is anticipated that Dr. Bleil’s work focusing on women’s reproductive health will have strong implications for interventions targeting children and young women to more effectively prevent/manage cardio-metabolic disease risk over the life course.