Heidi M. Feldman
American pediatrician
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Through Americans, Psychology and Developmental psychology
Feldman's publications include journal articles and books, including The Parent's Guide to Speech and Language Problems, Redesigning Health Care for Children with Disabilities, and Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics.
Feldman is a member of the 2020 inaugural cohort of the National Academy of Distinguished Educators in Pediatrics.
Education and career
Feldman earned her BA degree from the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in psychology, in 1970. She spent a gap year in Panama, working as a research assistant at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. She then returned to the University of Pennsylvania to complete a PhD in developmental psychology in 1975. In 1979, she received an MD from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, where she also completed her internship and residency, followed by fellowship training in developmental-behavioral pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital in 1984.
In 1984, Feldman joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. She moved to Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in 2006.
Feldman has been the president of the Society of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics.
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Research
Feldman has studied the development and resilience of language in children with atypical experiences or neurodevelopmental risks, including those who are deaf and blind, have early brain injury, experience chronic otitis media, are born preterm, or have developmental-behavioral conditions.
Feldman examined how children develop communication in the absence of language models through a longitudinal observation study that evaluated deaf children of hearing parents who were not exposed to sign language or verbal language. The results showed that the children created a manual-gestural system called "home sign," a structured system that included many features of spoken language.
Feldman investigated how properties of white matter in the brain relate to language and reading outcomes in children born preterm. Her research addressed the elevated risk of neurodevelopmental disorders, including impairments in language, cognition, and reading, among children born very or extremely preterm. Using diffusion MRI (dMRI) to characterize white matter, she conducted observational studies that combined neuroimaging and behavioral assessments to explore whether disruptions in white matter might underlie these outcomes. Her findings showed that children born preterm exhibited specific difficulties in linguistic processing speed, verbal memory, and reading comprehension, with group differences in white matter microstructure remaining stable across childhood.