Amanda Simard, MD
Amanda Simard, MD, is a Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition Fellow at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She completed her pediatric residency at New York Presbyterian/Columbia University, where she developed a strong interest in health equity, health equity education, and health services research. Her prior work has focused on improving healthcare access and outcomes for vulnerable pediatric populations, including children in foster care, and she helped develop and study innovative curricula to advance health equity in graduate medical education. Amanda is a recipient of the Health Equity, Alliance, & Leadership Excellence Award from NYP/Columbia in addition to multiple other awards in recognition of her commitment to compassionate, equitable patient care and medical education.
Her current research interests center on understanding how early-life adversity influences the gut microbiome and contributes to gastrointestinal, metabolic, and mental health outcomes in children. She is currently a Clinical Scholar in the Center of Microbiome Informatics and Thearpauetics, where she will aim to bridge pediatric gastroenterology with microbiome science, computational biology, and health equity research to better understand how social and environmental experiences become biologically embedded. Her long-term goal is to integrate her career as a pediatric gastroenterologist with advocacy by developing innovative, biologically informed approaches to reduce health disparities and improve outcomes for children affected by adversity.