Resilience In PreTerm Infants during DEvelopment (RIPTIDE)

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Preterm birth (<37 weeks' gestation) rates are rising. Although survival rates have largely increased, long-term outcomes have not improved over the last decades. Especially very preterm (VP) born children (<32 weeks) are at high risk for developmental impairments that persist throughout development and put a large burden on individuals, families, and society. Preterm birth and its consequences have almost exclusively been studied from a biomedical perspective, thereby neglecting the important role of social and environmental factors in child development and mainly focusing on deficits and problems. However, roughly half of the VP born children shows adaptive outcomes (i.e. resilience). RIPTIDE aims to provide insight in amenable factors that promote resilience after VP birth. The project uses data from population-based cohorts to study academic and mental health resilience in childhood and adolescence and resilience factors at multiple levels of the child's system. Moreover, dynamic change in resilience factors and subsequent outcomes will be studied, along with the system of resilience resources that a child has access to. Differential effects according to sex and context adversity will be examined to give insight in the needs of subgroups. Lastly, stakeholders' perspectives will be integrated with research findings to formulate policy priorities for multidimensional support for at-risk children. MSCA-PF would enable me to open-up this new avenue of resilience in preterm birth research. Insights from RIPTIDE will make an important contribution to the development of interventions and policies that promote positive development of all VP born children, including underrepresented groups. Executing this project at the University of Warwick and the OECD would be a unique opportunity to expand my skills set, enhance my career perspectives within and outside science, and narrow the research-policy gap to make a valuable contribution to improving outcomes after VP birth.