Program Overview

The UC Berkeley Maternal and Child Health Program (MCH) is part of the Division of Community Health and Human Development at the School of Public Health. It has provided superior graduate training, continuing education, research and service since its founding in 1953. The program has over 1,000 alumni across the country and around the world.

It is our mission to promote and protect the health status and well-being of women, infants, children, adolescents and their families through excellence in training, research, continuing education, service and advocacy.

All of the program’s activities are designed to be interdisciplinary and responsive to the newly emerging issues in MCH and to the unique needs of the diverse communities and cultures of the San Francisco Bay area, state of California, and the world.

About the Division

The Division of Community Health and Human Development (CHHD) aims to foster the interdisciplinary teaching and research on developmental epigenesis: that is, how biologically based differences in individual susceptibility and resistance work together with social, physical and cultural environments to influence the emergence of disease and the preservation of health over the human life course.

In addition to MCH, the Division comprises of three other programs of study:

• The UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program
• Health and Social Behavior
• Public Health Nutrition

Together, they offer diverse perspectives on the preservation of health and the origins of disease. The Division’s broadly multidisciplinary faculty represents, among others, the fields of medicine, epidemiology, sociology, health education, anthropology, health psychology, human reproduction, nutrition, economics, journalism and moral philosophy.