David Olds is Professor of Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Preventive Medicine, and Nursing at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, where he directs the Prevention Research Center for Family and Child Health. He has devoted his career to investigating methods of preventing health and developmental problems in children and parents from low-income families. The primary focus of his work has been on developing and testing in a series of randomized controlled trials a program of prenatal and infancy home visiting by nurses for socially disadvantaged mothers bearing first children, known today as the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP).

In recent years, Olds has developed collaborations with investigators from other countries who are adapting and testing the program in international contexts. A member of the American Pediatrics Society, the Society for Prevention Research, and the Academy of Experimental Criminology, Professor Olds has received numerous awards for his work, including the Charles A. Dana Award for Pioneering Achievements in Health, the Lela Rowland Prevention Award from the National Mental Health Association, a Senior Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Brooke Visiting Professorship in Epidemiology from the Royal Society of Medicine. Professor Olds obtained his B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. from Cornell.