Matthew Gillman, MD, SM, grew up in the Washington DC area and first came to the Boston area to attend Harvard College. After graduation he taught junior high math and science before heading to North Carolina for medical school (Duke) and residency (UNC-Chapel Hill). He then returned to Boston to work full time for 3 years as a primary care doctor for children and adults at the South Boston Community Health Center, where he spent an additional 15 years part-time. This "cradle to grave" medical practice has informed Dr. Gillman's research interest in how to prevent common health conditions like obesity, diabetes, heart and lung disease-starting at the earliest stages of human development. It is this passion that led to the idea of Project Viva in the first place.

For the past 14 years, Dr. Gillman has been a proud faculty member in the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. He also has a faculty appointment in the Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health. In addition to doing research, he is an active teacher of medical and public health students, and he sees patients in the Preventive Cardiology Clinic at Children's Hospital Boston.

Dr. Gillman, with his wife (a pediatrician) and 3 boys, lives in a Victorian-style 2-family house in Jamaica Plain. He enjoys playing chamber music and sports.

Dr. Janet Rich-Edwards is an epidemiologist and an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health. She is also the proud mother of three daughters, age 9, 11, and 12, who are big fans of Harry Potter and sluggers on the softball field.

Dr. Rich-Edwards received her master’s degree in Maternal and Child Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her doctorate degree in Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health. Her main research interests are the ways in which maternal and child health affect each other. She has worked on the national Nurses’ Health Studies for a decade, studying how a woman’s own birthweight predicts her risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes in adulthood. She has also examined whether women who were breastfed as infants have lower risk of cardiovascular disease in adulthood. Other projects have included examination of the ways in which adiposity and physical fitness affect female fertility. Dr. Rich-Edwards worked with Dr. Gillman to establish Project Viva. Within Project Viva, Dr. Rich-Edwards studies determinants of preterm delivery and maternal depression, with a particular focus on how psychosocial stressors (such as experiences of violence or racism) affect these outcomes. In the future, she plans to examine the clues that pregnancy-related factors (such as pregnancy complications, gestation length, or offspring birthweight) give us about the future risk of chronic disease in the mothers.

Dr. Oken is the co-Principal Investigator of Project Viva. Her research interests include the influence of nutrition and other lifestyle behaviors before, during, and after pregnancy on outcomes of pregnancy and later maternal and child health. In Project Viva, she has led studies about consumption of fish, which contain beneficial omega-3 fatty acids as well as potentially harmful pollutants such as mercury. She has studied the change in fish consumption among Viva moms following the January 2001 federal mercury advisory. She has examined associations of mom's fish consumption and mercury levels during pregnancy with child growth and development. She has also performed studies of prenatal risk factors for child overweight, including such behaviors as maternal smoking during pregnancy and pregnancy weight gain. Dr. Oken has clinical training in internal medicine and pediatrics, and is a primary care doctor at the Gretchen and Edward Fish Center for Women's Health of Brigham and Women's Hospital. She is interested in medical care for pregnant woman. Dr. Oken is also the mother of a son, Obioma, born in 2003, and a daughter, Amara, born in 2005.

Dr. Elsie Taveras is a co-investigator on Project Viva and a pediatrician at Children's Hospital Boston. Her research interests include prevention of childhood obesity, breastfeeding, promotion of diet quality and physical activity among preschool children, and improving clinical practice to prevent and manage childhood obesity. In Project Viva, Dr. Taveras has led a study examining the relationship between breastfeeding and later maternal feeding strategies. She also conducts studies of early growth and predictors of childhood obesity among the Project Viva children. Her interests in prevention of childhood obesity led her to develop the One Step Ahead Program, a childhood overweight prevention clinic at Children's Hospital Boston that helps families set healthy lifestyle goals.

Ken Kleinman Ken Kleinman is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and a biostatistician. He says that people think of statistics as one of the most frustrating and useless subjects they are ever subjected to. But statistics is the science of evaluating evidence, and can be one of the most satisfying things to do: it can show whether the data we collect really mean anything or not. In Project Viva, he works with all of the other investigators to help them see how the data reflect on their interests. His favorite project in Viva (so far) was working with Dr. Rich-Edwards on a study of whether the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 caused babies to be delivered before term (short answer: no). He lives in Amherst with his wife, seven year-old daughter (two months too old to be a Viva baby), and his three year-old son.