Heidi Feldman, MD, PhD is the Ballinger-Swindells Endowed Professor of Developmental and Behavioral Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.

Her research interests in child language and language development.  She has studied children developing typically and children with a variety of clinical conditions that put language learning at risk, either because the condition alters access to environmental input or to the neural substrates that process language.   The major project in her laboratory is the study of children born prematurely, some of whom have sustained injuries to the white matter of the brain.  The study will evaluate associations among behavioral measures, patterns of activation on functional magnetic resonance imaging, and white matter injury as measured on Diffusion Tensor Imaging. 

She continues to study the development of language, reading, and attention skills in a large cohort of children who were followed longitudinally as part of a randomized clinical trial of tympanostomy tube placement for chronic otitis media.  She is interested in the impact of bilingual exposure on children with developmental disorders, including children with autism. 

Finally, in the interest of improving the delivery of health care to children with developmental and behavioral disorders, she is participating in a study on applications of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF), to care coordination and long-term planning for young adults with developmental disorders as they transition into adult health care systems.