Dr. Sylvana Côté is a full professor at the École de santé publique at the Université de Montréal and a researcher at the Centre hospitalier universitaire Sainte-Justine. She heads the Observatory for Children’s Education and Health (https://www.observatoireenfants.ca/) and the Groupe de recherche sur l’inadaptation psychosociale chez l’enfant (GRIP: https://grip-info.ca/). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She has received national and international awards and honours, including senior fellowship from the Fonds de recherche du Québec, Research Chairs in the Netherlands (Utretch University) and France (IdEx Chair, University of Bordeaux), and a Marie Curie International Fellowship. She has won the Acfas award for Quebec-France cooperation.
Dr. Côté studies life trajectories, beginning in utero, leading to psychosocial and school adjustment in children and adolescents. She adopts a life-span perspective to study the associations between early family adversity (e.g. socioeconomic disadvantaged, parental mental health problems) and poor child outcomes, and to test the efficacy of population-based prevention programs. Her work focuses on the prevention of three overlapping problems: psychosocial maladjustment, mental health problems, and academic difficulties. She has documented the conditions under which early child care and education can foster children’s healthy development and reduce social disparities, and has identified programs to improve the quality of child care services offered to disadvantaged populations. Her research was published in over 200 peer-reviewed papers.
