Michelle Lampl

Michelle Lampl is an American physician, scientist, academic, and author. She is a distinguished professor and the Director of Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health. She is also the co-director of the Emory-Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute.

Lampl is recognized for her work proposing normal human growth to be a pattern of saltation and stasis. However, her original observations of human saltatory growth were not reproducible by several other groups and therefore remained controversial. Lampl has written and edited four books and over 130 scientific articles. Her work is featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary series Babies.

She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010.

Education
Lampl earned a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She earned her Doctor of Medicine degree from the Perelman School of Medicine.

Career
On completing her Ph.D., Lampl began lecturing at the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, and Princeton University before pursuing her medical degree. In 1994, she joined Emory University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and was advanced to Associate Professor in 1998, Full Professor in 2005, and was named the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology in 2006. Lampl was awarded the Emory Williams Teaching Award in 2003 and the University Exemplary Teacher award in 2018.

Lampl was appointed co-director of the Emory University Predictive Health and Society Strategic Initiative in 2005, adding responsibility as Associate Director of the Center for Health Discovery and Well-Being in 2007. She has been the co-director of Emory University/Georgia Institute of Technology Predictive Health Institute since its inception in 2007.

In 2011, Lampl became the founding director of the Emory Center for the Study of Human Health, where she created educational programs that integrate university-wide faculty to teach and award degrees in human health, predictive health, nutrition science, and a collaborative degree program with the Goizueta Business School in Health Innovation. In 2018 she was endowed the Charles Howard Candler Professorship of Human Health.

Saltation and Stasis Processes in Human Growth
Lampl's primary research focus is the process of normal human growth and the physiological basis of health, from the first cell onwards. Lampl proposed that children grow by saltation and stasis, a process characterized by sudden jumps (saltare, Lat) in size abruptly interrupting days of unchanging size. Her work documented that more than 90% of the time healthy infants and children are not growing at all, a finding detected by measuring babies daily. Increasing size was found to occur as bones suddenly elongate and propel a baby’s length and child’s height by as much as a centimeter in one day, after not growing for days to weeks in infancy, and weeks to months among children and adolescents.

However, others have since failed to reproduce these findings. Studies from other groups reported daily bone growth to be continuous rather than saltatory. Moreover, according to her original publication, the magnitude of single day saltatory growth is reported to be up to a centimeter, which would result in a bimodal distribution in semi-weekly growth measurement. However, semi-weekly growth measurement has a Gaussian distribution, which is therefore not consistent with growth saltation.

Linear bone growth is continuous in other mammals, such as mice, rats and rabbits. Saltatory growth is therefore not observed in other mammals, but the mechanism that distinguishes humans from other mammals thus allowing human-specific saltatory growth is not clear. The general understanding of the growth plate that drives linear bone growth is also not consistent with saltatory growth because chondrocyte proliferation and hypertrophy are also continuous rather than saltatory.

Fetal Growth
Humans begin life as a single cell and grow in size and complexity into a functional body over the course of nine months. Lampl’s studies employing ultrasound images demonstrated the challenge for the developing fetus to bring together both the architectural elements and energy resources to build the new body. Recognizing that by the time of birth some organs have completed their development (e.g., the kidneys and heart), while others remain to be established (aspects of the immune system), Lampl investigated specific influences on growth patterns and the importance of individual variability. For example, girls and boys do this distinctively, as do different populations. This work led to a collaboration with David Barker and the emerging science of developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD). Barker’s work is reviewed in Lampl and Roseboom’s educational course, The Origins of Health, available through Coursera.

Predictive Health
Predictive health focuses on health, not disease. The emerging science of predictive health proposes that there are many diseases based on few causes, in which fundamental processes associated with immune function, inflammation, oxidative stress, and regenerative potential impact health at the cellular level. Research documenting biomarkers of these processes permit anticipating the course of an individual’s health status over a lifetime, signaling health challenges long before the onset of disease.

Educating individuals about their own health status and how their behavior contributes to modulations in these fundamental processes is at the cutting edge of incorporating prediction in health care. This is foundational to transferring the responsibility for health upkeep from medicine to the individual. Lampl is introducing thousands of college students to this broader vision of health that they will carry with them throughout their careers and across their lives.

Books

 * It’s Your Health (2015)

Selected articles

 * Lampl, M., Johnston, F. E., & Malcolm, L. A. (1978). The effects of protein supplementation on the growth and skeletal maturation of New Guinean school children. Annals of Human Biology, 5(3), 219–227.
 * Lampl, M., Veldhuis, J., & Johnson, M. (1992). Saltation and stasis: a model of human growth. Science, 258(5083), 801–803.
 * Lampl, M., & Johnston, F. E. (1996). Problems in the aging of skeletal juveniles: Perspectives from maturation assessments of living children. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 101(3), 345–355.
 * Lampl, M., & Jeanty, P. (2003). Timing is everything: A reconsideration of fetal growth velocity patterns identifies the importance of individual and sex differences. American Journal of Human Biology, 15(5), 667–680.
 * Lampl, M., Kuzawa, C. W., & Jeanty, P. (2003). Prenatal smoke exposure alters growth in limb proportions and head shape in the midgestation human fetus. American Journal of Human Biology, 15(4), 533–546.
 * Lampl, M., & Jeanty, P. (2004). Exposure to maternal diabetes is associated with altered fetal growth patterns: A hypothesis regarding metabolic allocation to growth under hyperglycemic-hypoxemic conditions. American Journal of Human Biology, 16(3), 237–263.
 * Lampl, M., Gotsch, F., Kusanovic, J. P., Gomez, R., Nien, J. K., Frongillo, E. A., & Romero, R. (2009). Sex differences in fetal growth responses to maternal height and weight. American Journal of Human Biology, 22(4), 431–443.
 * Lampl M., Johnson, M.L. (2011). Infant growth in length follows prolonged sleep and increased naps. Sleep 34(5), 641-650.
 * Thompson, A. L., Monteagudo-Mera, A., Cadenas, M. B., Lampl, M. L., & Azcarate-Peril, M. A. (2015). Milk- and solid-feeding practices and daycare attendance are associated with differences in bacterial diversity, predominant communities, and metabolic and immune function of the infant gut microbiome. Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, 5.