 When people think of hunger, they conjure up an image of a starving child in her mother's arms. And certainly these children that are afflicted by war, conflict, and drought suffer inordinate pain and kills many children. But there's also a silent crisis of malnutrition that afflicts hundreds of millions of children around the world. And this silent crisis is characterized by households who are poor, who don't have access to clean water, don't have access to proper health care. And that's really the focus of my work. My research is about two things. One is understanding the determinants of malnutrition. What are those factors? What are those inputs that cause children to become chronically malnourished? And at the same time, it's not just understanding the why but trying to figure out what types of programs and policies and interventions can be formulated to address this terrible problem. One of the key lessons of my research is that there is a vulnerable period that stretches from approximately the time of conception until the time that a child is around two years of age. That is the most important time to intervene to ensure the long-term well-being of the child because it is during that period, during this critical developmental period that we'll set the stage for the health and the well-being of the child across their entire life course. The question about what can best be done to help and reach these children is actually quite complicated because there are many factors and issues that go into determining the health and nutritional status of children. But one thing that comes through very clearly is first, we need to ensure the health of pregnant women in utero because that is the time that the fetus is developing and these children are growing and their brains are developing and if we don't ensure the health of pregnant women during this vulnerable period they will have long-term implications. The second implication though is that after the child is born we've looked at a broad range of types of interventions that work and we find in fact that really basic health care and basic access to immunizations, a sanitary environment, promoting breastfeeding amongst women, promoting appropriate weaning foods and weaning practices and providing the types of basic curative services such as oral rehydration to stop diarrhea and so forth are really key elements to their well-being. Well one policy lesson is that oftentimes when we think about malnutrition we tend to think about problems of food alone. We tend to think about problems of access to sufficient food and certainly that's important but when we think about very young children who are most vulnerable in fact the constraint generally is not food access because firstly they don't eat very much, quite simply and in fact they're better off if they're exclusively breastfed at young ages but the real thing that causes or contributes to their malnutrition are problems for example of diarrheal disease, infection, measles other types of diseases that contribute to their stunted growth and we spend too little time thinking about providing those types of services to these young children. So a child who is sick with some sort of disease whether it be diarrheal disease or measles or HIV no matter what they eat they're not going to be well nourished and in fact they don't have any appetite to eat so ensuring their general health and understanding the interaction between infection and food consumption is really a critical issue. Regardless of all the things that government can do to assist in terms of caring for children by far the most important variable or factor is the mother and her ability and her knowledge in terms of how to care for her child.