Name Catherine Peckham | ||
Catherine Peckham CBE, MD, FMedSci, FRCP, FRCPath, FRCOG, FRCPCH, FFPHM, is a doctor and scientist. She was born in London, spent her early years in the US and she was educated at St Paul's Girls' School and University College London. She is married to Sir Michael Peckham and is the daughter of Alexander King.
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Catherine Peckham was the first Professor of Paediatric Epidemiology in the UK, and established the Centre for Paediatric Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the UCL Institute of Child Health, University College London. The Peckham Lecture is given each year at the Institute of Child Health.
Medical career
As a clinical epidemiologist she is best known for her work on infections in pregnancy, particularly rubella, cytomegalovirus and HIV, and their impact on the fetus and developing child. She showed that rubella damage caused by exposure to maternal infection during pregnancy could continue after birth. She worked on the early rubella vaccine trials and was instrumental in setting up the National Congenital Rubella Surveillance Programme.
In 1986 she founded the multi-centre European Collaborative Study (ECS) on HIV in mothers and children with Carlo Giaquinto. She was instrumental in establishing the national surveillance of HIV infection in pregnancy and childhood. Her study of vaccination for infectious diseases in childhood was published by Action Research as the Peckham Report in 1989. In 1986 she co-founded the British Paediatric Surveillance Unit. From 2005 to 2007 she chaired the Scientific Coordinating Group for the Government's Foresight Programme on the Future Challenge of infectious Diseases.
She has been closely involved in national birth cohort studies and the influence of biological, social and environmental factors in early life on later development has been a central theme in her work.