In 2001, pediatrician and epidemiologist Michael Kramer and his colleagues published the largest ever randomized trial on breastfeeding which followed 17,000 babies into their teenage years and showed links between how exclusively and for how long they were breastfed and improved cognitive development at an early school age. Kramer will oversee these types of important population health studies as the director for the Centre for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre.

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