2020 Awardee; deferred to 2021. 

Susan Furth, MD, PhD

Dr. Furth is the chief of the Division of Nephrology and vice chair of the department of Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she is an expert in chronic kidney disease in children. She is a professor of Pediatrics and Epidemiology and holds the Laffey-Connolly Endowed Chair at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. She previously served as president and vice president of the SPR.

Committed to pre-doctorial and post-doctoral training, Dr. Furth has personally trained dozens of post-doctoral fellows and junior faculty. Her relationships with her mentees, which include adult and pediatric nephrologists, rheumatologists, and urologists from multiple institutions across the country, have facilitated the research careers of multiple junior faculty.

“Dr. Furth has used her expertise in pediatric research to tirelessly advise the next generation of researchers,” said SPR President Joel N. Hirschhorn, MD, PhD. “We are excited to recognize Dr. Furth for her extraordinary leadership and commitment to ongoing training.”

Dr. Furth is the principal investigator of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Pediatric Center of Excellence in Nephrology, and the Chronic Kidney Disease in Children study, now in its 16^th year, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. This study is the largest multicenter prospective cohort study of children with chronic kidney disease ever conducted in North America, enrolling over 1000 children since the study’s inception.

Graduating summa cum laude, Dr. Furth received her undergraduate degree and MD from the University of Pennsylvania. She completed her residency and fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, where she also received a PhD in Clinical Investigation. In 2016, she was awarded The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Faculty Mentor Award.

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2020 Awardee; deferred to 2021.

Anna Penn, MD, PhD

Dr. Penn is a neonatologist and developmental neuroscientist at Children’s National Health System in Washington DC. She is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at George Washington University School of Medicine, with appointments in the Children’s National Fetal Medicine Institute, Neonatology and the Center for Neuroscience Research. In January 2020, she will join Columbia University as the new Director of Neonatology in the Department of Pediatrics.

Dr. Penn conducts translational work aimed at understanding and ameliorating preterm brain injury. Specifically, she studies the role of placental function in fetal brain development and damage, a cross-disciplinary research area she dubbed “neuroplacentology”. This work started with a 2009 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award focused on the development of novel genetic models to assess the impact of placental hormones in fetal brain development. Her lab now pursues several lines of investigation into placental hormones that impact neurodevelopment using novel models of perinatal brain injury, supported by both NIH and foundation funds.

In addition to her clinical and research work, Dr. Penn is committed to training the next generation of translational researchers. At Children’s National, she has been director of translational research for Hospital Based Specialties and of the Board of Visitors Perinatal Neuroprotection Program, both of which focused on increasing physician and scientist interactions and research training.  She participates in national committees and organizations, including the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) Task Force on Neonatal Encephalopathy and Cerebral Palsy, the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Cerebral Palsy Foundation and the Society for Pediatric Research.  She served as the Director of Membership for SPR for 6 years. 

Dr. Penn received her undergraduate degree in Biology from Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges. After spending a postgraduate year studying ‘philosophy of mind’ at Oxford University UK, she joined Stanford’s Medical Scientist Training Program in which she received her M.D. and a Ph.D. in neuroscience. She completed her pediatric residency at the University of California, San Francisco and returned to Stanford for her neonatology fellowship. She served on the neonatology faculty of Pediatrics at Stanford University prior to moving to Washington DC.

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2020 Awardee; deferred to 2021.

Sallie Permar, MD, PhD

Dr. Permar is a physician scientist focusing on the prevention and treatment of neonatal viral infections.  She leads a research laboratory investigating immune protection against vertical transmission of neonatal viral pathogens, namely HIV and cytomegalovirus (CMV), using human cohorts and nonhuman primate models.  Dr. Permar has made important contributions to the development of vaccines for prevention of vertical HIV transmission, defining both innate and adaptive immune responses that are associated with protection against infant HIV acquisition.  Moreover, Dr. Permar is leading the development of HIV vaccine strategies in preclinical maternal/infant nonhuman primate models and translation of this work for clinical vaccine trials in infants. Dr. Permar has also worked to understand the determinants of congenital and perinatal CMV transmission, developing the first nonhuman primate model of congenital CMV infection and designing human cohort studies that have been used to define the immune correlates of protection necessary to guide vaccine development.

Dr. Permar has a PhD in Microbiology/Immunology from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and completed her clinical training in pediatric infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital in Boston.  She has received several prestigious early-stage investigator awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE) and was inducted into the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI) in 2016 and Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) in 2018. She is an institutional and national leader in physician-scientist training, serving as the Associate Dean of Physician-Scientist Development at Duke University Medical School and was selected by the Association of Medical School Pediatric Department Chairs (AMSPDC) as the next Director of the national Pediatric Scientist Development Program in 2019.

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2020 Awardee; deferred to 2021.

Gary M. Shaw, DrPH

Dr. Shaw has 30 years of experience leading and directing research programs to investigate genetic and environmental risk factors for human birth defects and other pregnancy outcomes such as preterm birth. Dr. Shaw is professor and associate department chair in Pediatrics and (by courtesy) also professor of Epidemiology, and professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology at Stanford University. He has collaborated with many of the key researchers in the field and published more than 500 scientific papers. He has been the principal investigator or co-investigator on more than 50 government or foundation grants.

Some of his research has primarily focused on the identification of risk factors and preventives for human birth defects – the leading cause of infant death and childhood disability in the U.S. Dr. Shaw’s scientific discoveries of most significance have targeted nutritional etiologies of specific birth defects and focused on genetic susceptibilities to exogenous exposures as risks of birth defects. A link between maternal nutritional status and risks of birth defects has been heralded as one of preventive medicine’s most recent success stories.

His studies target perinatal and pediatric research and do so using a variety of methods, including state-of-the-art molecular techniques in combination with rigorous traditional epidemiologic approaches.  In these efforts he has collected and utilized big data sets, built large biologic repositories, pioneered the research use of newborn bloodspots, and developed and coordinated interdisciplinary teams. Conducting big-data investigations that include thousands of variables (genetic and nongenetic) and millions of subjects, has been part of his mainstream research process for 20 years.

“Dr. Shaw has a sustained record of excellence as a clinical investigator,” said SPR President Joel N. Hirschhorn, MD, PhD. “We are honored to recognize him with the Douglas K. Richardson Award for his significant contributions to child health research.”

Dr. Shaw considers teaching and mentoring of trainees to be one of his greatest privileges. Over the years, he has mentored the research trajectories of dozens of individuals at varying stages in their research training. He is highly motivated to answer important research questions that could improve care or prevent diseases in mothers and children. He serves on several scientific editorial boards and is an elected member of numerous professional societies. He has received multiple awards for his work in birth defects research.

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Stephanie Roberts, MD

Dr. Roberts is an attending physician in the Division of Endocrinology at Boston Children’s Hospital and an instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. As a physician-scientist, she investigates observations from her clinical practice to investigate at the molecular level how genetic variants affect the neurobiology of puberty and reproductive disorders.

Dr. Roberts initially studied the potential regulation of Makorin Ring Finger Protein 3 (MKRN3) by leptin, and more recently generated a novel mouse model with MKRN3 overexpression in the mouse hypothalamus, demonstrating the ability of MKRN3 overexpression to delay pubertal onset in female mice. Dr. Roberts now uses this model to explain the mechanism of action of MKRN3, which remains poorly understood. This also suggests that mutations in MKRN3 may be an unrecognized cause of delayed puberty in children. This work formed the basis of her K08 application.

“The SPR is pleased to support Dr. Roberts and her competitive resubmission for her K08 application,” said SPR President Joel N. Hirschhorn, MD, PhD. “Her ongoing research efforts are helping to advance the field of child health, and improve the diagnosis and management of pubertal and reproductive disorders.”

Dr. Roberts received her MD from the University of Connecticut and completed her pediatric residency at Hasbro Children’s Hospital. She completed her pediatric endocrinology fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital, where she gained experience in pediatric reproductive endocrine disorders and has continued there as an Attending in Endocrinology since 2016. During her fellowship, she joined Dr. Ursula Kaiser’s laboratory in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Hypertension at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and has continued there as a junior faculty member and an Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

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Dani Dumitriu, MD, PhD

Dr. Dumitriu is a pediatrician, neuroscientist and environmental health scientist. She joined Columbia University as an assistant professor of Pediatrics (in Psychiatry) in November 2018. She dedicates the majority of her time to basic science research into the neurobiological basis of resilience at the New York State Psychiatric Institute while also caring for newborns in the Well-Baby Nursery. Dr. Dumitriu is passionate about developing innovative avenues for the retention of physician-scientists in basic research. In the lab, Dr. Dumitriu conducts National Institutes of Health-funded research on the functional and structural connectivity patterns that differ in stress-susceptible versus stress-resilient mice. Recently, her team launched an open science online resource, MouseCircuits.org. This tool is meant to create an integrative picture of basic science neurocircuit dissection and ultimately help bridge the bench-to-bedside gap in the treatment and prevention of mental health disorders.   In a separate set of experiments, funded through a Research Initiatives in Science and Engineering (RISE) award from Columbia University, she is working with an interdisciplinary team of collaborators to spearhead an epidemiological-level study of wild rat stress and resilience in New York City. Additionally, she recently began a clinical trial of an intervention aimed at enhancing mother-infant emotional connection in the newborn period.

“We are thrilled to recognize Dr. Dumitriu with this award for her exceptional scientific research,” said SPR President Joel N. Hirschhorn, MD, PhD. “As a new member of the society, she has already demonstrated a firm commitment to furthering pediatrics research and promoting active collaboration among other physician-scientists and researchers.”

Dr. Dumitriu completed all her training at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Following graduation from the MD/PhD program and match into the Pediatrics residency, she successfully negotiated a custom-tailored individualized residency program with significant protected research time. This allowed her to maintain an active research commitment, while completing a residency in General Pediatrics and a fellowship in Pediatric Environmental Health over a five-year period. This ambitious and unconventional path was born out of a desire to escape the growing physician-scientist “leaky pipeline,” which has resulted in fewer and fewer MD/PhD graduates returning to bench science following prolonged clinical focus during residency. Taking full advantage of the flexibility of this custom program, Dr. Dumitriu began building her research program and was awarded an R01 from the National Institute of Mental Health while still in clinical training.

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Angelica Garcia

Dr. Garcia was born and raised in Puerto Rico, where she finished her medical education after studying and working at the National Institutes of Health performing clinical research. She believes minority providers like herself have unique backgrounds and opportunities in medicine. They are not only aware of issues that may go unrecognized by non-ethnic providers, but they are also the bridge to help equalize medical care. During her PEM fellowship training, she has had the opportunity to create and implement Quality Improvement initiatives in the pediatric emergency department that have improved the quality of care of all populations, but targeting the underserved, like those with sickle cell disease. These projects have been presented at both national and local conferences and she currently co-chairs Yale’s Resident and Fellow QI counsel. She has also embraced and collaborated with leaders in the field of Point of Care Ultrasound for rapid diagnosis and treatment of patients. Her most recent project involved the evaluation of pediatric chest wall thickness for needle decompression. In addition, she has mentored pediatric and emergency medicine residents, volunteered to run simulations to exposing them to high acuity, low frequency scenarios, and was involved in disaster preparedness. Lastly, she designed and implemented a simulation-based educational curriculum for YNHH EMS providers during their paramedics’ refresher course with the goal of evaluating pediatric assessment and treatment knowledge.

Monica L. Hoff, MD

As a third-year medical student, Monica fell in love with Pediatric Nephrology after caring for multiple patients with Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome. The following year, she began working with Brian Becknell, MD PhD and Ashley Jackson, PhD on kidney development and renal urothelium in the lab. Now as a second year Pediatric Resident at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, she continues to work in the Becknell lab, has presented at both regional and national conferences, and has received multiple research and travel awards, including the Jack Metcoff Award for The Most Outstanding Research Presentation by a Resident or Fellow at the Midwest Society of Pediatric Research Conference in 2019. In addition to her affinity for basic science, Monica has shown incredible leadership within her residency program in starting a Residency Diversity and Inclusion Coalition, creating a diversity magazine, and working to implement a novel Pediatric Equity and Advocacy Resident Learning Series (PEARLS) curriculum into the residency program.

Jenny Koo

Jenny Koo received her Bachelor in Science from UCLA in the major of Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology and completed her medical training at UC San Diego School of Medicine. She proceeded to pediatric residency and neonatal fellowship training at UC San Diego, where she worked on a number of research projects ranging from translational work on human milk thickeners to retrospective clinical research studies characterizing infectious thrombophlebitis.

Her most recent research and publication has been on novel biomimetic nanotherapeutic approaches to counteract bacterial toxins and deleterious inflammatory cytokine cascades in the context of neonatal sepsis.  This work is conducted in collaboration with the laboratory of Liangfang Zhang in UCSD Nanoengineering and under the co-supervision of Victor Nizet and Shelley Lawrence.  Her work on this project has earned her several travel grants, including the American Academy of Pediatrics Young Investigator Award, as well as invitations for oral abstract presentations.  This project has since been published in Frontiers in Pediatrics.

Eric Ortigoza

The goal of Dr. Ortigoza’s research is to better understand how the gastrointestinal (GI) system of premature infants develops over time. He measures gastric myoelectrical activity, bowel sounds, and mesenteric tissue oxygenation using non-invasive technologies such as electrogastrography (EGG), bowel sound/acoustics monitoring, and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), respectively. He is developing normative values of these measures to show how they change over time at different gestational ages.

Most recently, Dr. Ortigoza conducted a longitudinal, prospective cohort study of 59 preterm infants at different gestational ages. He used electrogastrography (EGG) to show how gastric myoelectric activity changed over time as babies matured. On the same day of the EGG measurements, he collected stool for microbiome analysis. He found that infants with a gastric dysrhythmia, called tachygastria, had an expansion of Enterobacteriaceae that preceded the development of surgical necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). Dr. Ortigoza is investigating whether EGG may be a potential tool for early detection of infants at risk of developing surgical NEC.

2020 Awardee; deferred to 2021.

Lindsay C. Burrage, MD, PhD

Dr. Burrage is an assistant professor with the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. As a physician-scientist and clinical biochemical geneticist, she has a long-standing interest in the pathophysiology of inborn errors of metabolism and their utility as models for more common disorders. She has a particular interest in the urea cycle disorders (UCDs). Dr. Burrage leads a clinical and laboratory-based program investigating long-term complications and new therapies for these disorders.

“We are excited to recognize Dr. Burrage’s outstanding research with this year’s Young Investigator Award,” said SPR President Joel N. Hirschhorn, MD, PhD. “Dr. Burrage has already proven herself as an exceptional researcher early in her career and demonstrated her commitment to furthering the collaborative research efforts that the SPR promotes.”

Dr. Burrage received her MD and PhD from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, where she studied Genetics. Following graduation, she completed her internship and pediatric residency with the Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital. She completed a genetics residency and fellowship in Biochemical Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine before becoming a faculty member.

Dr. Burrage initiated and completed a study of human recombinant arginase therapy for lowering plasma arginine levels in neonatal and adult mouse models for arginase deficiency, a UCD associated with intellectual disability, seizures and spastic diplegia.  This study led to the first clinical trial for a therapeutic agent specifically for individuals with arginase deficiency.  She is currently an investigator in the UCD consortium of the NIH Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network. In this consortium, she leads a major project investigating novel biomarkers for liver disease in individuals with UCDs.

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Amrik Singh Khalsa

Amrik Singh Khalsa is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and The Ohio State University. He is a Principle Investigator at the Center for Innovations in Pediatric Practice at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute.

As a Principle Investigator, Dr. Khalsa’s research interests lie in obesity prevention, with a particular focus in early childhood (birth – age 5 yrs) and families from disadvantaged backgrounds. Some of his prior work has included understanding parent’s role in shaping infant and early childhood feeding practices and how this affects infant growth trajectories including obesity. Some of his current work continues to examine the role of parenting and parental influences on their child’s risk of obesity including early food introduction. He is currently designing projects that will examine modifiable targets of parental behaviors to delay the onset of obesity in early childhood.

Augusto Schmidt

Dr. Augusto Schmidt completed his Pediatrics residency and neonatal fellowship at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and is currently faculty at the University of Miami. He is interested in the mechanisms of brain injury in preterm newborns, especially in the relationship between lung and brain injury in the setting of perinatal inflammation.

Brynne Sullivan

Dr. Brynne Sullivan is a Neonatologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. She has a K23 from NICHD focused on developing integrated predictive analytics for early detection and treatment of sepsis and necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) in premature infants. Her work involves detecting patterns predictive of impending illness exist in the data at hand- physiologic data such as heart rate and oxygen saturation from the bedside monitors, clinical data from the electronic health record, and biomarkers of immune activation in the bloodstream. The goal is to analyze, integrate and display physiomarkers, biomarkers and clinical markers of illness using predictive modeling in order to develop a comprehensive early warning system for late-onset sepsis and NEC in the NICU.Dr.

Sullivan has been at UVA since the start of her medical training and was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. She has 2 young children and her husband is an Emergency Medicine physician.

Michelle White

Michelle J. White, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Duke University with appointments in the Division of Hospital Medicine and the Duke Center for Childhood Obesity Research. She is a graduate of Yale University, Duke University School of Medicine and the Gillings School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The focus of Dr. White’s research is place and child health equity. Her work integrates geography with community engagement to describe the effect of built, social and perceived environmental factors on health behaviors and outcomes with the goal of translating this work to multilevel interventions tailored to vulnerable populations.

Leah Yieh

Dr. Yieh is an attending neonatologist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Her research involves applying cost-effectiveness analysis to perinatal and neonatal interventions in an effort to understand the clinical and financial implications of various treatments at the population level.

Her current research, which is funded by a K12 Pediatrician-Scientist Research Career Development grant and the Gerber Foundation, is entitled “Cost-effectiveness of Therapeutic Hypothermia in Neonates with Mild Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE).” This retrospective cohort study will compare the short and long-term clinical outcomes and associated costs of infants with mild HIE who receive therapeutic hypothermia versus normothermia by linking clinical and administrative databases. Her research aims to build a framework for standardized clinical practices while integrating health economics to improve neonatal outcomes.

Yuji Nakamura, MD

Yuji Nakamura graduated from Nagoya City University School of Medicine, then trained in Pediatrics, Neurology and Genetics. After board certified from Japan Pediatrics Society, he started his doctoral research at Nagoya City University in 2017. During his doctoral research, he identified constitutive activation of mTOR signaling in human patients with mutations in SZT2. He is expected to obtain PhD in March 2021. He has been trying to understand how the genetic conditions underlie pediatric patients with neurological disorders by exome or genome sequencing, and trying to characterize the functional consequences of the genetic variations using several techniques including biochemical methods.

Stella Kourembanas, MD
Clement A. Smith Professor of Pediatrics & Chief, Division of Newborn Medicine
Boston Children’s Hospital
Chair, Harvard Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Training Program
Harvard Medical School

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