Francheska Merced-Nieves, PhD

Francheska M. Merced-Nieves, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Environmental Medicine. She is a dually trained neuroscientist and environmental epidemiologist. She is also a member of the Mount Sinai Institute for Exposomic Research.

Dr. Merced-Nieves has expertise in early neurodevelopment, eye-tracking, and mixtures analysis. She earned her doctoral degree in Neuroscience from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2019. During her doctoral training, she studied the association between prenatal maternal stress and interactions with phthalates and infant cognitive development during the first year of life. Subsequently, she was an NIH T32 Postdoctoral Fellow in Pediatric Environmental Health Research at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. For her postdoctoral research, she studied how prenatal exposure to multiple metals and maternal stress are associated with changes in behavior during infancy and childhood. After completing postdoctoral training, she worked as a Research Scientist in New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, evaluating intensive behavioral health programs before being recruited back to Mount Sinai. She also serves as the Physiological Assessment Children’s Environmental Risk (PACER) laboratory Research Program Manager.

Her primary research interest is to investigate the impacts of prenatal exposure to environmental factors on children’s cognitive and behavioral development.