Some key findings include: 

• The role of socioeconomic status on developmental outcomes: It has long been recognized that social class is a strong predictor of neurodevelopment. For example, the prevalence of mild intellectual disability is more than twice as high in children from poorer households as among children whose families are more affluent. What has been less clear, however, is how this relationship impacts the effects of other, physiologic, risk factors for adverse development. I have been involved in a variety of studies which have sought to address this question by examining risk factors for intellectual disability and other developmental disabilities in more homogeneous phenotypic categories and within social strata. This work led to a paradigm shift in understanding that socioeconomic status contributes to severe intellectual disability when there are no other underlying biological factors that impact cognitive development, as well as an understanding that biological insults may impact the risk of intellectual disability differently depending on the child’s social class.
• The impact of vision impairment on children’s quality of life: Spectacles and/or contact lenses, and occlusion therapy are commonly used to treat in children with vision disorders. Further, even given early and aggressive treatment, a significant proportion of children with unilateral cataracts are left with poor vision in the treated eye and little stereopsis. However, relatively little is known about the impact of these treatments or these conditions on the lives of children and their families. Her work has focused on assessing the amount of occlusion therapy that these children receive during early childhood, as well as the impact of these treatments on quality of life and motor development.
• Understanding and minimizing bias in epidemiologic studies of perinatal outcomes:  It has become increasingly recognized that pregnancy, and in utero development, set the stage for later health outcomes and risk of disease.  However, high rates of loss to pregnancy losses – even before pregnancy recognition, the importance of stages of vulnerability, the difficulty of assessing exposure to the fetus as compared to maternal exposure, the often long lag between development and identification of conditions, and the reliance on maternal recall of events and exposures complicate epidemiologic studies of conditions.  Her methodologic work has sought to empirically investigate the impact of bias, particularly information bias, on the results of epidemiologic studies. Specifically, my dissertation investigated the extent to which mothers of infants who had died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome reported events with differential accuracy as compared to mothers of control infants.  This work led to work to investigate the impact of how choosing different control groups might rectify this situation as well as work on analytic methods to control for differential recall.  

Prior to coming to Mason, Dr. Drews-Botsch was a tenured professor at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.  Her administrative responsibilities included terms as Vice Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Associate Dean in the Laney School of Graduate Studies.