SPR Welcomes New Members in 2025

Brian Abraham, PhD

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Brian Abraham earned Bachelor of Science degrees with highest honors in Medical Informatics and Information Technology from the Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, NY). He obtained his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Boston University (Boston, MA). His dissertation research was performed at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and focused on chromatin dynamics during normal hematopoiesis. His postdoctoral fellowship at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research centered on computational study of enhancer biology, including the defining works on super-enhancers and their roles in normal developmental and several human diseases, including pediatric neuroblastomas, sarcomas, and leukemias, as well as many adult tumors. He joined the Department of Computational Biology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as an independent faculty member in 2019.

The Abraham laboratory invents, optimizes, and deploys computational approaches for understanding the control of pediatric cancer cell identity. The laboratory’s overarching hypothesis is that enhancer-driven core regulatory circuits dominate control of the expression landscapes of human cells and are responsible for the self-reinforcing cell identities of normal and diseased cells. The approaches of the laboratory center on analysis of applied high-throughput sequencing technologies that interrogate gene expression, chromatin makeup, and genome organization. Their integrative frameworks uncover how cell-identity-defining genes and regulatory elements are altered and abused in disease settings, especially in pediatric cancers. With expert chemist collaborators and molecular biologists, they explore the biomolecular consequences of chemistries that are showing promise in preclinical systems. This team science approach has enabled Brian to publish 70+ manuscripts in influential journals and be awarded the Hope Funds for Cancer Research fellowship for his study of difficult-to-treat cancers. He is a founding member of the St. Jude Transcription Collaborative and a former member of the American Association for Cancer Research Associate Member Council.

Nima Aghaeepour, PhD

Stanford University School of Medicine, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital 

Nima Aghaeepour is an Associate Professor and the Vice Chair for Research – Data Science in Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Pediatrics (Neonatology), and Biomedical Data Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. His research primarily focuses on the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence methods to study clinical and biological data in translational settings. This includes integrative multiomics analysis, wearable devices, and electronic health records to address global health challenges​.  Dr. Aghaeepour holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Tehran, a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from the University of British Columbia, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. He is also involved in translational research and entrepreneurship. He is an alumni of the Graduate School of Business’s Ignite program, a Biodesign Faculty Fellow, and a SPARK fellow,  and serves on various scientific advisory boards​ and has co-founded Takeoff AI, a venture-backed company focused on the use of AI to improve newborn health.  In addition to his academic and research pursuits, Dr. Aghaeepour has diverse interests, including piloting, wingsuiting, playing the piano, swimming, mountain climbing, chess, Starcraft, target shooting, modern art, and learning Mandarin Chinese​ (Aghaeepour Laboratory)​.

Xingbin Ai, PhD

MassGeneral Hospital for Children

As a developmental biologist, Dr. Ai focuses on pathogenic mechanisms of lung diseases that affect infants and young children. Dr. Ai’s major interest is the development of the nervous system in the lung and how age-related neural communication with airway smooth muscle cells, pulmonary neuroendocrine cells, and immune cells contributes to pathogenesis of childhood diseases, including allergic asthma and sudden infant death syndrome. In addition, at Mass General Hospital, Dr. Ai has been collaborating with physician scientists on lung defects caused by congenital diseases and prematurity using patient-derived airway epithelial and mesenchymal progenitor cells. These newly developed projects investigate lung defects in congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) and following respiratory viral infection in infants. These projects leverage our ability to derive airway basal stem cells and mesenchymal progenitors from tracheal aspirates of newborns and adults (as control).

Ashaunta Anderson, MD, MPH, MSHS

Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

Ashaunta T. Anderson, MD, MPH, MSHS is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Dr. Anderson received her bachelor’s degree in Human Biology at Stanford University, and her MD at Harvard Medical School. After her residency at Baylor, she completed additional graduate work at both the Harvard and UCLA Schools of Public Health. Dr. Anderson’s research program has two foci: (1) racial socialization and school readiness in young children; and (2) quality improvement in pediatric clinical settings.

Dr. Anderson is the Principal Investigator (PI) of an NIH/NIMHD K23-funded randomized controlled trial to pilot test an innovative pediatric primary care intervention to enhance parenting, prevent behavioral problems, and promote school readiness: Cultural Pride Reinforcement for Early School Readiness (CPR4ESR). CPR4ESR provides culturally-themed books and advice at well child checks for African American children ages 2-4 years. In developing this intervention, she: 1) documented the detrimental effect of racial discrimination on child health, 2) described the gender-specific mental health-promoting capacity of racial socialization into midlife, 3) described the perspectives of over 100 parents on early childhood racial socialization, and 4) piloted CPR4ESR in a diverse, largely Latino sample of young children, documenting improvements in parental CPR, child social skills, and child language development. However, a subsequent literature review revealed a stronger evidence base for CPR4ESR in African Americans as well as no book-sharing program for African Americans analogous to those available for Latinos. Therefore, CPR4ESR was redesigned with more sessions, content, and books specific to African American culture.  Dr. Anderson’s current research in sickle cell disease (SCD) focuses on both early and systemic intervention: tracking nationally endorsed, claims-based measures of quality of care in pediatric SCD. Evidence-based guidelines recommend that children with SCD, particularly those with the more common and severe form (sickle cell anemia), receive prophylactic antibiotics from the time of diagnosis to age five years. Guidelines further stipulate that the same children receive annual screens to assess stroke risk with transcranial Doppler (TCD) ultrasounds from ages two to sixteen years. Dr. Anderson evaluated Medicaid claims data and found that only about 20% of children with sickle cell anemia in California and Georgia receive appropriate amounts of prophylactic antibiotics, and roughly half receive annual TCD screens. This poor performance underscores the importance of these rigorous quality measures to facilitate meta-analyses by researchers,  quality improvement programs, and tracking by entities such as the national SCD Treatment Demonstration Program.

Thomas Arnold, MD, MS

University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine

Dr. Arnold is a pediatric physician-scientist formally trained in vascular biology, immunology, and neuro-development. His lab was first to characterize a role for the TGFb-activating integrin avb8 (ITGB8) in microglia development, and also studies how blood vessels grow and mature in the developing brain. He is particularly interested in understanding how brain-derived cues promote the formation of the “blood brain barrier”.  His long-term goal is to elucidate the regulation and niche interactions of blood vessels, immunologic cells, and the brain parenchyma at the blood brain barrier to improve the health of children and alleviate disease.

Renata Arrington Sanders, MD, MPH, ScM

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Dr. Renata Arrington Sanders is currently the Division Chief of the Craig-Dalsimer Division of Adolescent Medicine at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine. Prior to Dr. Sanders assuming the role of Division Chief, Dr. Sanders was an Associate Professor in the Division of Adolescent & Young Adult Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine with joint appointments in Infectious Diseases, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Departments of Epidemiology and Health, Behavior and Society. Dr. Sanders completed a Bachelor of Arts from Johns Hopkins University, a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and a Master of Public Health and Master of Science in Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Hygiene and Public Health. Dr. Sanders completed her Residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and completed a Fellowship in Adolescent Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Dr. Sanders research interests includes: Gender Affirming care, caring for sexual and gender diverse youth (SGDY), optimizing adolescent and young adult sexual health, HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention interventions. Dr. Sanders has utilized her knowledge and expertise to produce 82 original research articles, 10 peer review articles and has served as a co-author and/contributor to a plethora of book chapters and education materials. She has spent over 20 years caring for individuals that are living with HIV and at-risk for HIV, and cultivating both research, practice and strategies that address the intersectional and multimodal needs of young people across their life course and into adulthood. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Health Resources and Services Administration, and National Institute of Health National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA, 1R01DA043089-01, 1 R01 DA059022) fund her work. She currently serves on the CDC/HRSA Advisory Committee (CHAC) on HIV, Viral Hepatitis and STD Prevention & Treatment, the Research Review Committee of the American Board of Pediatrics, and Board of Directors of SIECUS, Sex Ed for Social Change, American Sexual Health Association, and cohort representative to Transform Program for the Association of American Medical College.

She has been an active member of the International AIDS Society (IAS) since 2012 working to address the HIV epidemic through the advancement of scholarship, science, and youth leaders, and has had the pleasure of serving on the Governing Council since 2020 (North America Region, first Adolescent Medicine-trained representative), the abstract, scholarship, IAS Stigma Advisory Board, Collaborative Initiative for Pediatric HIV Education and Research (CIPHER), Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and Programme committees. She was Lead Rapporteur for Track D at AIDS 2022 and has assisted with IAS Educational Fund webinars, leading a team of experts to help the IAS develop its first statement of commitment to providing gender-affirming care to all in 2023.

Khyzer Aziz, MD

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins Children’s Center

Khyzer Aziz is a neonatologist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, Maryland, specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of premature babies or newborns with high-risk or complex health conditions. Dr. Aziz is also an assistant professor of pediatrics and general internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He began his academic journey at the University of Florida College of Medicine. Later, he received training at the Jacobi Medical Center in New York, and completed a fellowship in pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, before officially joining the faculty in 2020.

In addition to being a neonatologist, Dr. Aziz is highly innovative and skilled in the latest medical and technological advances. He is director of the Johns Hopkins NICU Precision Medicine Center of Excellence, associate director of the Master of Science in Applied Health Sciences Informatics Programs in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, and is the chief medical information officer (CMIO) for Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. Dr. Aziz is a designated researcher for the Johns Hopkins AI-X Foundry, an organization that provides the framework and support infrastructure for artificial intelligence and data science efforts across the Johns Hopkins institutions. Along with his expertise in machine learning, data science and ethics, he is a member of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Artificial Intelligence Task Force. As the CMIO for Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, Dr. Aziz focuses on using emerging technologies, such as generative AI, in health care to help transform how high-quality, cutting-edge care is delivered to patients and their families in today’s increasingly digital world.

Dr. Aziz’s research involves using complex information found in electronic medical records and national registries/databases to provide clear, cohesive and concise information for patients, families and clinicians that can be used for clinical decision-making and neonatal precision medicine. With his research team, he is pioneering processes for nuanced automated neonatal data collection locally and globally using the OHDSI/OMOP common data model. This team has secured several big grants, including funding to establish Maternal Health Research Centers of Excellence and the Center for Disease Control’s Pregnant People-Infant Linked Longitudinal Surveillance grant. Additionally, Dr. Aziz is developing and validating neonatal-specific severity of illness metrics: the neonatal sequential organ failure assessment (nSOFA) score and the vasoactive-inotropic score (VIS). He has published this work in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals. His research group is funded by intramural, extramural and industry grants.

Timothy Bahr, MD, MS

University of Utah School of Medicine, Intermountain Healthcare

Dr. Bahr is a neonatologist and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Intermountain Healthcare and the University of Utah. Dr. Bahr completed medical school at the University of Iowa and then his pediatrics residency at Phoenix Children’s Hospital in Arizona. He completed his fellowship in neonatology and neonatal hematology with Drs. Robert Christensen and Robin Ohls at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT.

Dr. Bahr’s research and clinical interests are in hematologic disorders of neonates. He has published extensive clinical and translational research in areas such as (1) the management and diagnosis of neonates with hyperbilirubinemia; (2) preventing, detecting, and managing iron deficiency in preterm neonates; and (3) improving neonatal transfusion practices.

Nicolas Bamat, MD, MSCE

University of Pennsylvania, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Dr. Nicolas Bamat is a neonatologist and clinical investigator dedicated to improving outcomes for infants and families impacted by lung disease of prematurity. He is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and is a member of the Division of Neonatology and the Newborn and Infants Chronic Lung Disease Program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

His research program is focused on helping to identify safe and effective pharmacotherapies for neonatal lung disease. He applies clinical pharmacology, clinical trial and pharmacoepidemiology methodologies in his research. His current focus is on the use of furosemide in infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD). Dr. Bamat serves as an Associate Editor for Cochrane Neonatal, is an Executive Board Member for The International Society for Evidence-Based Neonatology (EBNEO) and leads the Pharmacology Working Group of the BPD Collaborative.

Abby Basalely, MD, MS

Cohen Children’s Medical Center

Dr. Basalely is an attending at Cohen Children’s Medical Center at Northwell Health and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at The Donald and Barbara Zuckr School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. Dr. Basalely earned a Bachelor of Arts from Stern College, Yeshiva University and a medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She completed her residency and chief residency at Cohen Children’s Medical Center.  She graduated from her pediatric nephrology fellowship at The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore with a Master’s degree in clinical and translational research from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Dr. Basalely’s clinical and research interest are in acute care nephrology, continuous renal replacement therapy, neonatal and pediatric acute kidney injury and pediatric hypertension.

Daniel Benedetti, MD, MA

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Dr. Dan Benedetti is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. Dr. Benedetti received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and medical and master’s degrees from the University of Washington. He completed residency training in pediatrics and a Clinical Bioethics fellowship at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, before joining the faculty at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2018. Dr. Benedetti is a solid tumor oncologist with expertise in pediatric renal tumors and cancer predisposition syndromes, and conducts clinical trial research to improve treatments for children with renal tumors, in addition to research exploring ethical dilemmas that occur in the care of children with cancer.

In bioethics, Dr. Benedetti’s research aims to advance understanding of situations where patients and families refuse or abandon childhood cancer treatment. He has conducted qualitative interviews with pediatric oncologists about experiences with these cases, a project that has led to multiple first author publications that describe a taxonomy of treatment refusal, non-adherence and abandonment (TRNA) (Benedetti et al, Frontiers in Pediatrics, 2023, PMID: 36699305), and report a series of cases where pediatric oncologists successfully overcame refusal without legal intervention, leading to the families’ voluntary acceptance of recommended treatment (Benedetti et al, Pediatric Blood & Cancer, 2023, PMID: 37638811). Additional analyses examine the legal involvement in these TRNA cases, as well as the strategies and approaches pediatric oncologists reported taking to try to resolve the conflict without legal involvement. The overall goal of this research is to understand how often patients and families refuse or abandon curative treatment, and to develop evidence-based interventions to support oncologists and families as they navigate these conflicts with the mutual goal of maximizing the chances of curing the child’s cancer.

As a clinical researcher, Dr. Benedetti has established himself as an expert in pediatric renal tumors, with projects advancing understanding of the management of higher risk pediatric renal tumors. Dr. Benedetti collaborated with colleagues at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s to describe the tolerability of an ifosfamide-containing chemotherapy regimen in a cohort of patients with high-risk renal tumors (Wong* & Benedetti* et al, Pediatric Blood & Cancer, 2023, PMID: 37218455), which is now being considered as the backbone chemotherapy regimen for a phase II study under development. Within the Children’s Oncology Group (COG), Dr. Benedetti co-led an analysis of patients with favorable histology Wilms tumor (FHWT) and extrapulmonary metastases treated on recent therapeutic clinical trials, reporting on prognostic factors in this important subgroup of higher-risk FHWT patients (Benedetti et al, Cancer, 2023, PMID: 37933882). He additionally led an analysis of patients with clear cell sarcoma of the kidney (CCSK) treated on COG studies AREN0321 and AREN03B2, reporting the improved outcomes achieved through risk-stratified therapy (Benedetti et al, Cancer, 2024, PMID: 38396300). In addition to these first-author publications, Dr. Benedetti has collaborated on numerous COG renal tumor projects and publications. His continued clinical research centers around developing and running clinical trials for children with renal tumors. Dr. Benedetti is the vice chair of the stage IV arm of the upcoming COG FHWT Phase III clinical trial, AREN2231, “Risk-Adapted Treatment of Unilateral Favorable Histology Wilms Tumor”, which will ask and answer many important questions about optimal treatment of the most common pediatric kidney cancer.

Eric Benner, MD, PhD

Duke University School of Medicine

Following the birth of Eric’s own 28 week twins while still in medical school, he decided to pursue a career as a physician-scientist in neonatology. The long-term goal of his laboratory is to significantly improve the neurologic outcomes of all infants born preterm. His laboratory investigates the postnatal subventricular zone (SVZ) neural stem cell niche and is discovering how direct injury to this important structure influences neurologic outcomes following complications of preterm birth. This stem cell niche forms the ventricular border of the germinal matrix and is the site of critical postnatal neuronal and glial cell production required for normal neurodevelopment. The most common form of brain injury that impacts neurodevelopment in preterm infants is diffuse white matter injury (DWMI). His laboratory is establishing novel links between the development of DWMI and inflammatory injury to the subventricular zone – the very structure that is tasked with the production of oligodendrocytes needed for white matter development.

Eric’s laboratory has recently identified a novel injury to the subventricular zone in a mouse model of neonatal intestinal perforation. They identified an injury to the multiciliated ependymal cell layer that lines the surface of the SVZ and forms a functional barrier between the CSF and the stem cell niche. Their investigation determined that these ependymal cells activate the NFkB pathway, recruit inflammatory cells into the SVZ via the choroid plexus, and ultimately die by pyroptosis. Using this preclinical model, they determined that this injury could be visualized in mice using cranial ultrasound. Mice with modeled intestinal perforation developed subventricular zone echogenicity (SVE). To determine if this injury occurred in preterm infants following intestinal perforation, they performed a retrospective analysis of preterm infants in our unit at Duke University. They discovered that the development of SVE was highly associated with a history of intestinal perforation in these infants. Moreover, the development of SVE was associated with future moderate-severe motor impairment. While DWMI cannot be visualized until near term ages are reached, SVE can be detected within 48 hours of intestinal perforations suggesting that SVE may be an extremely early biomarker of poor neurologic outcomes. This work was recently published in Cell Stem Cell (Epstein et al. 2024).

Eric’s laboratory is also committed to developing innovative therapeutic approaches to change the neurologic trajectory of infants born preterm. One example is our recent discovery that breast milk-associated oxysterol (oxidized cholesterol derivatives) act on glial restricted progenitor cells (GRPs) to induce oligodendrogenesis (Chao et al. 2023. Cell Stem Cell). Using a combination of pharmacologic and genetic approaches, they determined that oxysterols promote oligodendrogenesis via sonic hedgehog signaling through Gli2. To test the efficacy of oxysterols in repairing DWMI, his laboratory developed a clinically relevant mouse model of DWMI following modeled intestinal perforation. Intestinal perforations in infants can arise spontaneously or can be associated with necrotizing enterocolitis. Regardless of the specific etiology, intestinal perforations are the leading risk factor for the development of DWMI and the associated neurodevelopmental impairment.

These oxysterols efficiently penetrate the blood brain barrier and increase oligodendrocyte progenitor cell production from the injured SVZ. Treatment of mice following neonatal modeled intestinal perforation resulted in increased numbers of oligodendrocytes in the periventricular white matter, improved myelination, and reversed motor impairment. To translate this finding for patients in the NICU, Eric co-founded Tellus Therapeutics and continues to serve Tellus’ acting Chief Scientific Officer. Working with the FDA, Tellus has completed all necessary IND-enabling work for 20-Hydroxycholesterol and is on track to start a phase I clinical trial in healthy adult volunteers this December and infants 1 year later.

Justin Berk, MBA, MD, MPH

Hasbro Children’s Hospital at Rhode Island Hospital, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University

Justin Berk, MD MPH MBA is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics. He is board certified in Internal Medicine, in Pediatrics, and in Addiction Medicine. He is a core faculty member and clinical educator for the combined Internal Medicine – Pediatrics residency program and researcher dedicated to improving care for individuals with substance use disorder and exposure to the criminal legal system. He also founded The Cribsiders Pediatric Medicine podcast (which was reached over 2 million downloads) and has published several papers on innovative pedagogies in medical education.

Dr. Berk received a NIDA-funded K23 Career Development Award exploring the use of injectable buprenorphine in carceral settings as a way to reduce opioid overdose deaths and mitigate health disparities. He has written over 50 peer-reviewed publications related to clinical medicine, education, addiction, and correctional healthcare in New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Academic Medicine and other high-impact journals. He is the author of the book chapter “Health Effects of Incarceration” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice.

Dr. Berk has been a leader in pediatric medical education, creating one of the most popular extra-curricular resources for pediatric medical education and has mentored a team of over 30 medical students, residents, advanced practice practitioners, and attendings in creating one of the most successful pediatric podcasts in the nation. He has presented this work at national conferences and the show continues to grow to have over 20,000 listeners to each new episode.

John Bernat, MD, PhD

University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital

Dr. Bernat is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Division of Medical Genetics and Genomics, Stead Family Department of Pediatrics, University of Iowa Health Care. He has a particular interest in the evaluation and treatment of individuals with lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs), a group of rare diseases caused by a deficiency of a lysosomal enzyme resulting in improper accumulation of substrate, inflammation, and a wide range of multisystem effects. Examples of LSDs he evaluates and treats include Pompe disease, Fabry disease, Gaucher disease, metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD), and the mucopolysaccharidoses (MPS), including individuals identified by newborn screening. In addition to providing clinical care, Dr. Bernat also directs the Division’s clinical research program in the LSDs and serves as site principal investigator or co-principal investigator for multiple active industry-sponsored clinical trials for new therapeutics, including enzyme replacement therapies and gene therapies, as well as various rare disease registries. He also serves as a medical consultant for the Iowa Newborn Screening Program in screening for lysosomal disorders such as Pompe disease and MPS I.

Scott Bickel, MD, MS

University of Louisville School of Medicine, Norton Children’s Hospital

Since fellowship, hypothesis-based research has been an integral part of Dr. Bickel’s career despite also maintaining a very active clinical role in pediatric pulmonology. During fellowship, Dr. Bickel investigated rates of non-adherence with obtaining asthma prescriptions and its association with different forms of insurance coverage. During that time, he also designed and implemented a study looking at flunisolide in small airway function in children with asthma. Since fellowship, Dr. Bickel designed and implemented a study looking at the impact of insurance formulary changes on asthma outcomes. He is currently focused on studying the longitudinal impact of intentional environmental greening on pediatric asthma with support from the Kentucky Pediatric Clinical Trials Rural/Urban Partnership and the American Lung Association. Dr. Bickel and his colleagues have a prospective cohort of children who have been followed quarterly for one year to assess the impact of intentional environmental greening (compared to children living in a control area). These results have been accepted for presentation at the CHEST conference in October 2024 and the manuscript is being written presently. Dr. Bickel has another study underway to assess the impact of this intervention on healthcare utilization in the broader pediatric population in the intervention versus control areas.

Dr. Bickel has been involved and has funding associated with the IDeA States Pediatric Network (ISPCTN) since 2016 when the initial grant was awarded. He serves as an early-stage investigator in the Upper and Lower Airway Core. Dr. Bickel serves on the ISPCTN Upper and Lower Airway Working Group and has performed scientific reviews for multiple proposals under consideration by the Network. He has been involved as the site PI in several NIH IDeA state funded studies and in multiple ISPCTN writing groups, leading to four peer reviewed, published manuscripts to date. Dr. Bickel designed and wrote a clinical trial to evaluate the impact of environmental mitigation using HEPA filters in homes where there is smoking and/or vaping exposure which has been included as part of the University of Louisville’s grant renewal application for this coming cycle (submitted Spring 2024). He continues to work within the ISPCTN, within the Division of Pulmonology, and with partners across the University (including the University of Louisville Envirome Institute) to design, fund, and advance trials aimed at improving understanding of pediatric respiratory disease with a focus on environmental modifiers.

Katherine Bline, MD

Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Ohio State University College of Medicine

Dr. Katherine Bline is a pediatric intensivist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, OH, with a specific interest in the immune response to respiratory viruses in critically ill children. She grew up in Bloomington, Indiana before going to the University of Notre Dame for her undergraduate degree and attending medical school at the Ohio State University College of Medicine.

Dr. Bline’s research focuses on immune suppression that can occur in children who become critically ill with respiratory viruses, particularly the role of myeloid-derived suppressor cells in perpetuating immune suppression and the impact of this cell population on clinical outcomes. The ultimate goal of the Bline Laboratory is to identify and develop more targeted treatments for this vulnerable population of children.

Dr. Bline is also an active member of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and serves as a member of the AAP Committee on Pediatric Research to identify major research questions and promote funding for pediatric research. She also serves as a member of the steering committee of FLEXPeds, which is committed to improving gender equity in academic medicine, the AAP Section on Early Career Physicians, and on the Data Committee for the Ohio State University College of Medicine Women in Medicine and Science (WIMS). As a member of the National Pediatric Scientist Collaborative Workgroup, Dr. Bline also works with other physician-scientists across the United States to promote retention and expansion of the pediatric physician-scientist pipeline. Additionally,  Dr. Bline is known as an exceptional mentor and educator and has received several teaching awards recognizing her commitment to clinical education.

Outside of work, Dr. Bline enjoys spending time with her husband and three children, playing tennis, and traveling.

Merrian Brooks, DO, MS

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Brooks is a board-certified pediatrician, after completing residency at Cooper Children’s Regional Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. She also is a board-certified adolescent medicine physician, having finished her fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Currently, she spends most of the year in Gaborone, Botswana, in Southern Africa, doing work she started as a CHOP David Pincus Pediatric Global Health fellow. She is now an attending physician in adolescent medicine in the Craig Dalsimer Division of Adolescent Medicine at CHOP and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. She also serves as the Lead Pediatrician and Research Director at the Botswana UPENN Partnership. Dr. Brooks is a global health focused physician researcher whose research portfolio includes screening for common mental disorders, integration of mental health services into various medical and non-medical settings. She also seeks an understanding of which contextual factors matter most when adapting interventions. Her participants are globally underserved adolescents and she hopes here work can inspire them. She is profoundly interested in improving the health systems and promoting positive indicators and overall well-being of adolescents in low- and middle-income countries.

Christie Bruno, DO

Yale School of Medicine

Dr. Bruno is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and a Neonatologist at Yale School of Medicine.  Dr. Bruno’s research interest is in resuscitation training as well as educational assessment.  She is currently working with emergency departments (ED’s) and community NICU settings to improve the outcomes of newborns born in these settings.  She has utilized a simulation-based educational model in this work.  She has a particular interest in ways in which we can look at the systems and resources of these institutions to improve the quality of care delivered.  She is also interested in work to establish role clarity in newborn intensive care units which often have many types of providers (attendings, residents, practitioners, nurses) delivering care to newborns.  There have been recent challenges nationally with regard to multiple providers in newborn intensive care units with regard to role clarity and procedural competition with more providers that has compromised teamwork and collaboration in this setting.

For scholarship, she has previously conducted and published a randomized trial to understand the best way to teach obstetric residents modified neonatal resuscitation steps in the event that a pediatric provider is not available or delayed for a critical delivery.  This study showed the benefits of simulation-based education in this realm.  In collaboration with pediatric and emergency medicine colleagues, she has published a simulation-based study on how stress may impact the ability of emergency medicine providers to perform in a simulated newborn resuscitation.  She has recently published Neonatal Boot Camp and Exchange Transfusion chapters for a neonatal simulation guidebook for the American Academy of Pediatrics.  She has also published a chapter on the The Critical Role of Simulation in ECMO Education in a Neonatal Simulation textbook.

Dr. Bruno’s goal is to improve the quality of the simulation and procedural training education for trainees as well as the community hospital and emergency department resuscitation training for providers in these settings with the continued goal of improving neonatal resuscitation outcomes. Having recently joined the international collaborative, ImPACTS(Improving Pediatric Acute Care Through Simulation) as a neonatal lead, she will continue to expand her role with further national collaborations.

Kathryn Burge, MS, PhD

University of Oklahoma College of Medicine

Mary Carol Burkhardt, MD, MHA

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

Dr. Mary Carol Burkhardt is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.  She completed her medical degree at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and residency training at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. She then pursued a Master of Health Administration from Ohio University, enhancing her expertise in healthcare management. Currently serving as the Associate Division Director of Primary Care in General & Community Pediatrics, she spearheads initiatives aimed at improving health equity in primary care settings.

Her research initiatives are broad-ranging, addressing clinical issues and healthcare disparities. She employs a quality improvement framework to assess and enhance care delivery methods, with notable projects encompassing areas such as food insecurity, vaccine equity, outreach strategies, and integrating preventative behavioral health into primary care services. Dr. Burkhardt is recognized for her collaborative approach to research, bringing together clinical insights and real-world experience to tackle innovative research questions. Her overarching goal is to innovate and refine patient-centered primary care practices, aiming to optimize healthcare delivery and outcomes for all patients, particularly those facing socioeconomic challenges. Her work underscores a commitment to advancing health equity through practical, evidence-based interventions in pediatric primary care.

Marie Camerota, PhD

Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University

Marie Camerota is a developmental psychologist at the Center for the Study of Children at Risk at Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She completed her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill followed by a T32 postdoctoral fellowship in Child Mental Health at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University.

Her program of research focuses on environmental and biological contributors to early life neurodevelopmental trajectories in at-risk populations including children born very preterm. She has specific expertise in the development of higher-order cognitive processes including executive function. Dr. Camerota’s recent work includes a behavioral epigenetics focus, investigating how differences in DNA methylation may (a) improve our ability to predict long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes in at-risk populations, and (b) help us understand the biological embedding of environmental risk factors. She has also pioneered the use of child-centered approaches for characterizing neurobehavioral outcomes and phenotypes following very preterm birth. She is currently the PI of a K01 Career Development Award from NIMH that aims to use trajectories of DNA methylation to predict the development of attention problems in children born very preterm. Dr. Camerota is passionate about applying her developmental science lens to advance pediatric research with high-risk populations with the goal of improving neurodevelopmental outcomes for all children. She is equally passionate about mentoring the next generation of scientists and has been honored by awards for her research productivity and mentorship.

Rochelle Cason-Wilkerson, MD, MPH

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Children’s Hospital Colorado

Dr. Cason-Wilkerson is a board-certified, fellowship-trained pediatrician. She attended Spelman College for her undergraduate degree and then completed her medical degree at Meharry Medical College. She received a scholarship through the Army to attend college and medical school, so upon graduating, she completed her residency training at Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington. She served in the military as a general pediatrician and held multiple leadership positions. After 13 years, she decided to leave the military at the rank of Major to pursue further training. She was accepted and completed a Primary Care Research Fellowship, at which time she also completed a Master’s of Public Health from the University of Colorado School of Public Health.

Dr Cason-Wilkerson is a health equity researcher whose research interests include early childhood obesity in preschoolers from minority backgrounds and developing and adapting interventions for this population. She feels this is needed to ensure early care and decrease health disparities, allowing for equitable health outcomes. She is also interested in how social determinants of health (SDoH) impact low-income minority patients seeking weight management care in tertiary care hospital-based clinics. Dr. Cason-Wilkerson strongly believes in service to her community, so among other community work, she has served on the executive board for the Center for African American Health and is currently an executive board officer for the Hope Center, which is one of the oldest early education centers in Denver, Colorado, serving predominantly minority children to ensure educational excellence by offering advanced preschool curriculum as well as testing for children who may be gifted and talented. Additionally, the Hope Center serves Adults with intellectual disabilities to ensure daytime programming and care to enrich their lives. She works with her church and recently completed a medical missionary trip to Accra, Ghana, caring for over 100 children and their families. She was originally born and raised in Sacramento, California, but now calls Denver, Colorado, home, where she lives with her husband, a professor in business, and her two sons, who are 18 ( headed to college) and 11( headed to middle school). She enjoys spending time with her family and hobbies of reading, photography, scrapbooking, and trying not to kill her plants.

Natalie Chan, MD, MPH

UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco

Dr. Natalie Chan (MD, MPH) is an academic neonatologist trained in neonatal neurology and a Clinical Assistant Professor at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is the Medical Director of the Intensive Care Nursery Follow-Up Program at UCSF and Associate Director of the Neuro-Intensive Care Nursery at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital – West Bay.

Her research aim is to understand the long-term outcomes of children who need neonatal intensive care, the predictors and exposures that influence these outcomes, and ultimately the modifiable factors that can improve health and developmental outcomes. By identifying strategies to better protect the vulnerable developing brain of these infants, her goal is to improve their care and help each of them live to their fullest potential. She is also passionate about health equity for the most vulnerable infants in both low and higher resource settings, with a goal of contributing to translational research that can influence health policy to affect change on a larger scale.

Mallory Chavannes, MD

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, University of Southern California

Dr. Chavannes is a graduate of McGill University, in Montreal Canada. She completed her pediatric training at the Western University in Ontario, Canada, and her pediatric gastroenterology fellowship at the University of Montreal. She pursued an advanced IBD fellowship at the University of British Columbia, where she also completed a Master of Health Science. She is currently an assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. She has participated in optimizing and standardizing the care of patients with IBD at her institution.

Dr. Chavannes’ research has focused in the past on the evaluation of therapies in inflammatory bowel diseases, as well as therapeutic drug monitoring. She is the recipient of a KL2 career development scholarship, during which she has expanded her interest in point-of-care monitoring of disease of pediatric patients with IBD, particularly using intestinal ultrasound as a biomarker of disease activity. Her team is involved in assessing the multifaceted impact of intestinal ultrasound in pediatric IBD care.

Lauren Chernick, MD, MSc

Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital

Dr. Lauren Chernick an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in Emergency Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons with a secondary appointment as an Associate Professor in the Department of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health. She is a practicing pediatric emergency medicine physician board certified in Pediatrics and Pediatrics Emergency Medicine and has dedicated her career to both the clinical care of children and the study of how to improve the health of adolescents and young adults. She has been the Principal Investigator (PI), Co-Investigator, and site PI on multiple grants and was funded through a K23 Career Mentored Development Grant from the National Institute of Child and Health Development (NICHD) as well as is the PI of a R21 from the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) and a co-PI on a R21 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). She was also the past Chair of the PECARN (Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Network) Adolescent Sexual Health Working Group, ran the pediatric research intern program in her emergency department (ED) for 8 years, and currently teaches two graduate level courses focusing on child and adolescent development and adolescent sexual health. Her specific research focuses on improving adolescent sexual health through designing, testing, and implementing innovative and engaging digital health platforms that fit into ED workflow. As an investigator, Dr. Chernick has extensive experience with qualitative and quantitative data analysis, user-centered design, digital health, and ED-based trials.

Fu-Sheng Chou, MD, PhD

Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine, Southern California Permanente Medical Group

Dr. Fu-Sheng Chou is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Clinical Science at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine and an attending neonatologist at Southern California Permanente Medical Group within Kaiser Permanente Southern California (KPSC). Dr. Chou’s research focuses on developing prediction models in the areas of growth and respiratory outcomes using longitudinal data from de-identified clinical data warehouses and real-world electronic health records (EHR), with the goal of better informing neonatal care and improving the long-term health of prematurely born children. Dr. Chou has used the Cerner Health Facts de-identified patient database to model postnatal growth trajectories and showed sex differences in postnatal weight gain trajectories of extremely preterm newborns. Recently, Dr. Chou collaborated with Pediatrix Medical Group and used data from the Pediatrix Clinical Data Warehouse to develop intrauterine and postnatal growth trajectory charts for infants admitted to neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). The postnatal growth trajectory charts for preterm infants that Dr. Chou and colleagues developed allow predictive and prescriptive growth assessment, and have been used for subsequent studies to assess the roles of antenatal corticosteroids and exclusive human milk-based diet on neonatal growth in the NICU.  In addition, Dr. Chou recently developed a machine learning-based prediction tool for bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) utilizing demographic data and early-life longitudinal respiratory data from EHR. This project was based on the overarching hypothesis of a developmental origin of BPD. Currently, Dr. Chou is funded to investigate the role of longitudinal respiratory data at term-equivalent age on childhood health risks, as well as the growth trajectories of prematurely born children following discharge from neonatal intensive care up to 3 years of age.  Dr. Chou is proficient in R, the programming language for statistical computing, and regularly uses it for data wrangling, statistical analyses and modeling, as well as for creating static (graphics, static webpage development) and interactive presentations (web applications).

Joseph Chou, MD, PhD

MassGeneral Hospital for Children, Harvard Medical School

Joseph Chou is currently an attending neonatologist at the MassGeneral for Children Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and Director of Clinical Analytics and Performance Improvement. The recurring theme in his professional career trajectory is the application of technology and data-driven computational approaches to solving problems, advancing research, and improving clinical care. In 2016, Partners Healthcare (now MassGeneral Brigham) made the huge transition to the Epic electronic health record system, a change which supported ‘big data’ analytic approaches. Joseph Chou developed the expertise and tools for leveraging data from the Epic EHR to support clinical research, quality improvement, decision support, and operations support.  Clinical research projects supported by this expertise include: 1) leading a combined research and quality improvement project spanning seven Massachusetts NICUs to optimize nutrition and growth by analyzing inter- and intra-site growth trend; 2) developing a public web-based clinical growth analysis website (http://peditools.org/) which currently receives ~300,000 site accesses per month from hundreds of health systems; 3) developing machine learning models for serum bilirubin trend prediction and comparison to clinician predictions; 4) analyzing the effect of the new AAP 2022 hyperbilirubinemia guidelines for newborns. Additional quality improvement and administrative monitoring projects include tracking: reduction of antibiotic utilization; improving adherence to hepatitis B vaccination guidelines; NICU census, unit closure, and readmissions; unintended extubation; morbidity & mortality report generation; reducing newborn hypothermia on admission (in press); optimizing management of neonatal abstinence syndrome; hearing screen and CMV screening; reducing time to first enteral feed; hyperbilirubinemia clinical decision support.

Robin Clugston, MSc, PhD

University of Alberta Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry

They were born and raised in Scotland, where they completed undergraduate training at the University of Glasgow. They then obtained their PhD from the University of Alberta, undertook postdoctoral training at Columbia University in New York City, and then started their independent research program back at the University of Alberta in the Dept. of Physiology in 2016. Their research program is centered on the physiological actions of vitamin A, and its contribution to human health. This includes an emphasis on the importance of signaling through the active vitamin A metabolite, retinoic acid, in the developing embryo particularly in the lungs and diaphragm, in the context of the birth defect Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia. They are also interested in the maternal transfer of vitamin A during pregnancy and lactation, and factors that contribute to the establishment of adequate vitamin A status in childhood.

Marie-Coralie Cornet, MD, PhD

UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco

Dr. Marie Cornet is a Neonatologist at Benioff Children’s Hospital, University of California, San Francisco. Her research focuses on understanding the risk factors and outcomes of term neonates with encephalopathy and seizures. Dr. Cornet completed her pediatric residency at the University of Louvain, Belgium, before moving to the University of California, San Francisco, in 2016. She completed her Neonatology fellowship in 2022.

Her initial work focused on the early recognition of neonates with genetic epilepsies among the vast group of neonates with seizures, most often acute.  During her neonatology fellowship, she received awards from the UCSF Newborn Brain Research Institute and the Thrasher Early Career Award to study how maternal exposure to SSRIs impacts the risk of hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) and other neonatal outcomes.

After completing her fellowship, Dr. Cornet received a K23 award from NICHD to evaluate how maternal chorioamnionitis during labor impacts the risk and severity of HIE and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in term infants.  To achieve her goals, she studies a large population-based cohort comprising >250,000 neonates, born between 2012 and 2019, among 15 Kaiser Permanente Northern California Hospitals. She found that the population incidence of HIE, defined as perinatal acidosis and encephalopathy, is 1.7/1,000 and stable over time. She is now analyzing detailed maternal, labor, delivery, and neonatal characteristics to assess how maternal fever and other signs of chorioamnionitis in labor, affect the risk of HIE.

Daniel Corwin, MD, MSCE

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania

Daniel Corwin, MD, MSCE is a Pediatric Emergency Medicine Attending Physician, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Director of Clinical and Translational Research for the Division of Emergency Medicine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and Associate Director and Emergency Department Lead of the CHOP Minds Matter Program. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, medical school at the New York University School of Medicine, and then his pediatric residency, pediatric emergency medicine fellowship, and a pediatric emergency medicine research fellowship at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He additionally completed a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania.

His research focuses on improving acute concussion diagnosis, risk stratification, and management, specifically investigating the impact of objective physiologic measures of injury on concussion diagnosis and prognosis, and exploring the effectiveness of novel care pathways to improve care outcomes for concussed youth evaluated across diverse care settings.

Jillian Cotter, MD, MSCS

University of Colorado School of Medicine, Children’s Hospital Colorado

Dr. Cotter is an Assistant Professor, Pediatric Hospitalist, and a physician scientist. Her research program focuses on optimizing management and outcomes for children hospitalized with infections through the implementation of diagnostic stewardship, antibiotic stewardship, and high-value care practices. She is specifically interested in pediatric pneumonia, one of the most common and costly diagnoses among hospitalized children. She has identified low risk patients for antibiotic de-implementation efforts, has explored clinician decision making in those patients, and has conducted comparative effectiveness studies comparing outcomes between antibiotics (yes vs no) and antibiotic route (intravenous vs oral) for children hospitalized with pneumonia.

Eileen Cowan, MD

University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health

Dr. Eileen A. Cowan is an associate professor in the Division of Neonatology and Newborn Nursery. She currently serves as the pediatric pre-clerkship director in the Department of Pediatrics and as the NICU residency rotation director. In her role as pre-clerkship director, Dr. Cowan integrates pediatric content into the pre-clinical portion of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health’s ForWard Curriculum, fostering student interest in pediatrics. Nationally, she participates in the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Council of Faculty and Academic Societies (CFAS). Dr. Cowan is a dedicated neonatologist with a focus on improving patient outcomes through the use of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS), providing support to families in need, and exploring the impact of education on clinical care and trainee competency. Her research spans medical education and the application of POCUS in NICUs. She leads projects aimed at enhancing resident competency in neonatal core content and procedures. Additionally, Dr. Cowan investigates gender parity in American academic medical centers (AMCs), including the promotion and hiring practices based on gender and academic track. She also explores best practices and curricular outcomes in medical education.

Carrie Cowardin, PhD

University of Virginia School of Medicine

Carrie A. Cowardin, Ph.D. received both her B.S. (Biology, 2010) and Ph.D. (Microbiology, 2015) from the University of Virginia. As a graduate student studying the intestinal immune response to Clostridium difficile infection, she was fascinated by the complex immune and bacterial environment of the gut. This work fostered a deep interest in understanding how gut microbial communities influence host health, and lead to her postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey Gordon at Washington University in St. Louis. There, Dr. Cowardin investigated the relationship between diet and gut microbes in the context of childhood growth stunting, and identified mechanisms by which a component of healthy breast milk promotes bone growth in early life. She returned to the University of Virginia in 2020 to start her own lab in UVA’s Child Health Research Center.

The Cowardin laboratory focuses on understanding how the gut microbiota during pregnancy and early postnatal life set the stage for lifelong immune responses. Undernutrition and linear growth stunting in a child’s first 1,000 days perturb metabolic and immune programming with lifelong implications for health and productivity. This syndrome is multifactorial and intergenerational; mothers who experience growth stunting are more likely to give birth to stunted children. The gut microbiota play a pivotal role in shaping the development of both intestinal and systemic immune responses, and stunted children are known to have altered microbial communities and mucosal immunity. The laboratory has developed multiple animal models of intergenerational growth stunting using human and murine intestinal microbiota. The long-term goal of the lab is to leverage these models to identify critical host pathways that can be modulated by members of the gut microbiota to protect against pediatric infectious diseases and improve child growth.

Mary Crocker, MD, MPH

Seattle Children’s, University of Washington School of Medicine

Dr. Mary Crocker is a pediatric pulmonologist with public health training who is passionate about developing ways to reduce environmental impacts on pediatric lung disease. She is currently a scholar in the University of Washington Pediatric and Reproductive Health Scholars K12 program, funded by the NIH National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Dr. Crocker’s primary work has focused on designing and testing strategies to reduce exposure to indoor air pollution, such as from biomass stove use, wildfire smoke, and indoor allergens, particularly for children with asthma. Dr. Crocker also aims to empower parents, healthcare providers, and community health workers address wildfire smoke and other environmental triggers of asthma. Her work uses a variety of methods including survey science, qualitative and mixed methods, implementation science, and community-engaged research approaches.

Danielle Cullen, MD, MPH, MSHP

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Danielle Cullen is the Associate Director for Implementation Science at Clinical Futures, a faculty member at PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and assistant professor of pediatrics and pediatric emergency medicine at CHOP and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a senior fellow of the University of Pennsylvania Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and co-course director for Master Level Introduction to Implementation Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Cullen’s research focuses on socio-economic health disparities, in particular childhood food insecurity. Her long-term goal is to improve health equity among socially disadvantaged children through the development of effective, acceptable, and feasible strategies to identify social need and improve family engagement with desired resources. She is dedicated to community involvement in research and programmatic design, and leveraging methods from Community-Based Participatory Research and Implementation Science to enhance reach and sustainability of developed programs. Her current interdisciplinary research portfolio includes: mixed-methods evaluations of social determinant screening modalities, locations and referral processes; a hybrid implementation-effectiveness study of the USDA’s summer food service program across seven CHOP clinical settings; and a qualitative evaluation of low-income families’ experiences with a clinically-based subsidized organic produce box program. In addition to her research, Dr. Cullen is a member of the advisory board for the hunger pillar of CHOP’s Healthier Together initiative and CHOP’s social care governance committee. She serves on multiple city-wide committees, including as co-chair of the food insecurity workgroup for the multi-institutional COACH (Collaborative Opportunities to Advance Community Health) initiative to address social determinants of health in southeastern Pennsylvania.  Dr. Cullen earned her Master of Public Health in Maternal and Child Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and her medical degree from Jefferson Medical College. She completed residency in General Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC. There, with support from the American Academy of Pediatrics, she developed a screening and intervention protocol for food insecurity in the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh Emergency Department. This protocol was integrated into the electronic medical record system as the standard of care and has now been expanded to the hospital’s inpatient and outpatient settings. She completed Pediatric Emergency Medicine fellowship at CHOP while also serving as a T32 research scholar, earning her Master of Health Policy Research from the University of Pennsylvania.

Jennifer Cully, DMD, Med

Children’s National Health System, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences

Jennifer L. Cully, D.M.D., M.Ed. is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at George Washington University and the Chief of the Division of Oral Health in the Goldberg Center for Community Pediatric Health at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) in Washington, D.C. She also serves as the Director of Research for the Division of Oral Health where she manages the division’s research initiatives and resident-driven projects. Dr. Cully received a B.S. in Biology from the College of William & Mary in 2003, D.M.D. from the University of Medicine and Dentistry – New Jersey Dental School in 2007 and certificate in pediatric dentistry from Children’s National Medical Center in 2009. In 2019, Dr. Cully received a Master of Education from the University of Cincinnati.

Dr. Cully is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry (AAPD) and the American College of Dentists. Her other accolades include being selected to the AAPD / AAPD Foundation Leadership Institute held at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University from 2019 – 2023. For her research efforts, Dr. Cully was selected for the 2022 Jeffrey A. Dean / American Board of Pediatric Dentistry Research Fellowship and, during her tenure at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center she was one of two individuals to be selected to the Education Scholars Research Program. At CNH, Dr. Cully is a member of the Children’s Academy of Pediatric Educators (CAPE).

Dr. Cully was recently installed as the Trustee At-Large (Academic) in the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry (AAPD). She has been a member of several AAPD committees including serving as chair of both the Early Career Pediatric Dentistry Committee (2016 – 2020) and the Council on Membership and Membership Services (2021 – 2024). Dr. Cully was also a member of the AAPD’s Council on Clinical Affairs and was recently featured as a speaker on the AAPD’s podcast “Pedo Teeth Talk”. Dr. Cully was a member of the AAPD’s Foundation Grants and Programs Committee and is a part leader for the American Board of Pediatric Dentistry qualifying exam sub-committee and an examiner for the oral clinical exam. Dr. Cully’s areas of interest include educational assessments, quality improvement, dental trauma, and behavior guidance.

Deborah Davis, PhD

University of Louisville School of Medicine

Dr. Davis is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Director of the Child and Adolescent Research Design and Support (CAHRDS) unit and the Louisville Twin Study. Her PhD is in nursing with doctoral and post-doctoral training in developmental psychology. Her current research is focused on health and developmental equity. Additional interests are early childhood development, promoting positive parenting, and prevention of behavioral and mental health problems.

As Director of the Louisville twin Study, she is a multiple-PI on an R01 from the National Institute for Aging studying factors associated with risks for dementias. The Louisville Twin Study was a longitudinal study of children’s cognitive and behavioral development, which has now been extended to early- to mid-life cognitive and biological aging. The comprehensive longitudinal data provides an opportunity to explore childhood and adult risk factors for Alzheimer’s and other dementias. She plans to continue to seek funding to follow these twins and their siblings and parents into older adulthood.

In addition to expertise in various areas of content, Dr. Davis has experience in planning and implementing both qualitative and quantitative studies, database development and data management, grant and manuscript preparation, and mentoring cross-disciplinary undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral trainees and faculty. She has recently extended her mentoring to serve as an Associate Director for the APA’s Research Scholar’s Program.

Keyur Donda, MBBS

University of South Florida

Joelle Donofrio-Odmann, DO

University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego

Dr. Donofrio-Odmann graduated Cum Laude from Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Vallejo, California. She completed her residency in Pediatrics at the University of Southern California, a fellowship in Pediatric Emergency Medicine (PEM) at Harbor-UCLA, and a second fellowship in Emergency Medical Services (EMS) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She is an associate professor in the Clinical X series at UCSD where she is core faculty in both the Department of Pediatrics, Division of PEM, and the Department of Emergency Medicine, Division of EMS. Dr. Donofrio-Odmann works clinically in the emergency department, administratively as the EMS medical director of the Children’s Hospital and the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of the City of San Diego, and has built her research projects around improving her field of medicine.

While Dr. Donofrio-Odmann spent time performing bench research evaluating epileptogenesis in glutamate receptor knock-out mice at the NIH during her first summer of medical school, it was a project completed during her residency that sealed her commitment to research. The approach the emergency department took to medically screen pediatric psychiatric patients seemed costly and ineffective. Her research team’s dive into this subject led to 5 manuscripts but more importantly – a significant change in practice – first at her own hospital, then regionally, and nationally. The series of publications led to a mention in the ABP MOC reading list and were the basis of one of the six 2022 PEM Choosing Wisely Campaign points. Given her niche in pediatric EMS, which includes disaster medicine, she followed this with a multi-center research project to determine the optimal pediatric disaster algorithm. This led to 9 manuscripts and the development of new technology for capillary refill simulation. Dr. Donofrio-Odmann knows the power of research to change and improve clinical practice.

Dr. Donofrio-Odmann has continued to further her niche in EMS, setting herself up for a career in both EMS and specifically out-of-hospital cardiac arrest research. Dr. Donofrio-Odmann has positions in both the American Heart Association and the EMS node of the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Node (PECARN). Her California Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (CAL-ROC) multi-center research team has just submitted a UG3/UH3 grant to perform the largest prospective out-of-hospital cardiac arrest trial ever. Dr. Donofrio-Odmann is committed to a career improving medicine through research.

Stephanie Doupnik, MD, MSHP

Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Northwell Health

Stephanie Doupnik, MD, MSHP is an NIH-funded researcher, practicing pediatric hospital medicine physician, and health systems leader. Her expertise spans pediatric hospital medicine, population health, health services research, clinical epidemiology, mental health services, and suicide prevention. Dr. Doupnik’s research focuses on improving children’s mental health and wellbeing through individual-level and population-level interventions. She is particularly interested in integrating mental health services into acute medical care for children. She has conducted comparative effectiveness and outcomes research for mental health interventions delivered in the context of general medical care, qualitative research centering the perspectives of adolescents, their caregivers, and their clinical care providers, and implementation research focused on integrating suicide prevention into general medical care.

Dr. Doupnik completed an undergraduate degree in comparative literature at the University of Virginia, medical school at Drexel University, and pediatrics residency at Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center. She completed an Academic General Pediatrics fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and a master’s degree in health policy research at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the faculty at Vanderbilt, Dr. Doupnik was an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and a practicing pediatric hospital medicine physician and a Principal Investigator within the PolicyLab and Clinical Futures research centers at CHOP. Her research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Cardinal Health Foundation, and the Academic Pediatric Association.

Amy Feldman, MD, MSc, PhD

Children’s Hospital Colorado, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Amy Feldman, MD, PhD, FAASLD, is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado. She is a Transplant Hepatologist at the Children’s Hospital Colorado where she serves as the Medical Director of the Liver Transplant Center and the Program Director of the Advanced Hepatology/Liver Transplant Fellowship. Dr. Feldman completed her medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, followed by residency training in Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, fellowship training in Pediatric Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the Children’s Hospital Colorado, and advanced fellowship training in Pediatric Liver Transplantation at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Dr. Feldman has also completed a PhD in Clinical Sciences from the University of Colorado. Dr. Feldman’s research focuses on improving outcomes for children who undergo liver transplantation. Her K08 funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (K08 HS026510) focuses on immunizations and vaccine preventable infections in the pediatric transplant population. Dr. Feldman is also funded by a NASPGHAN Foundation Mid-Level Career Development Award to investigate the cost differences between living donor and deceased donor liver transplant. Dr. Feldman is the President Elect of the Society of Pediatric Liver Transplantation (SPLIT).

Yarden Fraiman, MD, MPH

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School

Yarden Fraiman (he/him/his) is an attending neonatologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Fraiman is a health services researcher.

His research focuses on racial and ethnic inequities in neonatology specifically, the role of modifiable structures and systems in society that continue to uphold neonatal health inequity across the pediatric life-course. His research uses multilevel analytic approaches to understand the many ways racism impacts health. Dr. Fraiman also serves as a the Associate Director for Health Equity in the Department of Neonatology and is the Vice Chair of the Neonatal Justice Collaborative.

Lauren Frazer, MD, PhD

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine

Dr. Lauren Frazer is a neonatologist-scientist at UNC Chapel Hill. She works with Dr. Misty Good studying necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) and helping to lead the nation’s largest biorepository for samples from neonates with NEC. Dr. Frazer is utilizing the skills she acquired from her PhD in immunology and clinical training in neonatology to build a research program that studies NEC, neonatal intestinal immunology, and signaling involved in neonatal intestinal epithelial cell injury. She was recently awarded a K08 from the NIDDK to continue her research. With the support of Dr. Good and the UNC Department of Pediatrics, she is working towards her ultimate goal of improving the outcomes for medically fragile neonates with NEC through innovative hypothesis-driven research.

Jonathan Gaffin, MD, MMSc

Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital

Dr. Jonathan Gaffin is the Director of the Clinical Research Program for the Pulmonary Division at Boston Children’s Hospital Pulmonary, He has expertise in observational and clinical trials in children with chronic respiratory disease, with a primary focus on disease morbidity in relation to environmental health. He has extensive experience in performing research in children with chronic lung disease, including asthma, bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), and cystic fibrosis, in the hospital, home and school environments. Dr. Gaffin has support from NIH, foundation, and industry sponsors to performing single center and multicenter clinical trials.

Dr. Gaffin’s research primarily focuses on understanding the underlying causes of asthma and BPD related morbidity in children, especially related to environmental contaminants. His research has contributed to the knowledge of how school- and home-based environmental exposures to allergens and air pollutants contribute to respiratory symptoms, lung function impairment, and exacerbations in children with chronic respiratory conditions. As a dual board certified Pediatric Pulmonologist and Pediatrician physician-scientist Dr. Gaffin has over 17 years of expertise in evaluating and managing children with asthma and children with preterm lung diseases, such as BPD, as they progress through childhood and adolescence. From this perspective, he has become passionate about understanding childhood respiratory morbidity, especially as it may relate to vulnerable populations, and has a deep understanding of the knowledge gaps and priorities for children and families with these conditions, the medical teams that care for them, and the scientific community.

Paul Geeleher, PhD

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

In recent years major strides have been made in our ability to study human tumor heterogeneity using high-throughput genomics technologies like single cell and spatial transcriptomics. In parallel, we have gained the ability to screen very large numbers of preclinical disease models (including cell line panels) with pharmacological agents or CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing. However, while screening in cell lines is highly scalable and has yielded clinically impactful findings across many diseases, the fidelity of these models is often unclear and the computational infrastructure to determine which (if any) components of human tissues are recapitulated by various preclinical models has not been developed. The overall goal of our lab is to develop the computational infrastructure that allows the results from preclinical screening to be interpreted in the context of a detailed understanding of human tissue biology, and in understanding this relationship to nominate new opportunities for drug repurposing, the development of new drug targets and new drug combinations. The primary computational tools we use for this purpose are that of unsupervised and supervised machine learning, applied to data from leading edge genomics technologies like single-cell and spatial genomics. While the computational work is highly generalizable, we specifically use these unique computational skills to push forward our own clinical translational and mechanistic work focused on neuroblastoma.

Nicole Gilbert, PhD

Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine

Nicole Gilbert grew up in southern Indiana and western Missouri and came to St. Louis in 2005 after completing undergraduate training at Concordia University Nebraska. She attended graduate school in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, and did her postdoc training in the Department of Molecular Microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine. Her training in the labs of Amanda Lewis, PhD and of David Hunstad, MD was supported by the American Heart Association, the Children’s Discovery Institute, the Center for Women’s Infectious Disease Research, and a K01 Research Scientist Development Award from the NIDDK. Her outside interests include reading, hiking, organizing her church’s youth group, and spending time with her husband and three kids.

Nimrod Goldshtrom, MD, MS

Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Dr. Goldshtrom has a broad background in pediatrics, with specific training and expertise in neonatology and pediatric cardiac intensive care. He has also completed a master’s in patient oriented research on his path towards being a clinical research scientist. His research includes working with high fidelity big data sets of physiologic patient vital signs to provide prediction and clinical support tools to care teams. This includes work on evaluating the utility of near infrared-spectroscopy (NIRS) devices in preterm infants for intestinal perfusion, comparing intermittent hypoxic events in preterm infants as defined by high fidelity data versus standard bedside charting in medical record, use of transcutaneous carbon dioxide monitoring and cerebral autoregulation in infants around the time of cardiac surgery.

Dr. Goldshtrom’s current focus on cerebral autoregulation aims at taking a promising tool that providers better neurologic surveillance in adults with brain injury and learning if it can be applied to neonates who are critically ill to optimize hemodynamic care at the bedside. Dr. Goldshtrom has a foundation grant to look at whether measures of autoregulation in babies recovering from congenital heart surgery is associated with neurodevelopment at two years of age. If an association exists, it suggests that targeting blood pressures to keep autoregulation within a safe range could reduce the neurologic injury these children experience as part of major open heart surgery and recovery. Dr. Goldshtrom also supports trainees who are also looking at how autoregulation is associated with the type of heart disease or surgery they have, if it is associated with short term outcomes and what medications have the biggest impact on blood pressure management to keep autoregulation in a safe zone.

Dr. Goldshtrom also is looking at how the unique care model that he works in provides added value to the care of neonates with heart disease. Using a database he has curated with over fifteen years of data on babies who had heart surgery in a dedicated infant cardiac unit, he is looking at how involving neonatal expertise into the care of babies with heart disease can improve outcomes and reduce complications. Ongoing work is looking at risk factors for poor outcomes in preterm infants who undergo heart surgery, whether physiologic signals such as oxygen trends can predict outcomes such as necrotizing enterocolitis and need for early second stage single ventricle repair.

Richard Goldstein, MD

Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School

I am a palliative care pediatrician who focuses on the development of an integrated, comprehensive medical approach for sudden unexpected deaths in the pediatric age range. I serve on the faculty of Boston Children’s Hospital Department of Pediatrics, where I am the co-Founder and Director of Robert’s Program in Sudden Unexpected Death in Pediatrics (SUDP), a first-of-its-kind translational program exploring sudden unexpected pediatric deaths as undiagnosed diseases. I conduct research pursuing undiscovered etiologies in SUDP and have developed case adjudication and phenotyping strategies used in many NIH-funded projects on which I have served as PI, Co-Investigator, and Collaborator.

My research investigates intrinsic biological factors involved in SUDP and pursues diagnostic features that can further define the phenotype of unexplained infant and child death. This has resulted in new discoveries of implicated genes and related diseases, which have in turn provided evidence to refine the heterogeneous phenotypes of SIDS and SUDC. I am also involved in functional studies of detected genetic variants, using tissue and zebrafish models.

I engage in grief research. SUDP is a diagnosis shared during grief at a time of especially strong attachment behavior (attachment is a key heuristic for grief research). I was the principal investigator for a grief study of over 400 mothers whose infants died from SIDS, and I have described the severity and features particular to their grief, conducted research on pre-loss maternal characteristics and how they predict different grief-related outcomes, and investigated the post-loss relationship of a parent with their deceased child. My work in SUDP also includes advocacy efforts, epidemiology re-evaluating basic assumptions related to statistical associations of risk, and the development and promotion of standardized nomenclature around unexplained pediatric death.

I have a broad background in pediatrics, including over 15 years in the pediatric primary care setting and ten years practicing palliative care with the Pediatric Advanced Care Team at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital. I am motivated to understand families in difficult circumstances and to help improve medicine’s responses to their challenges. Focusing on sudden unexpected death in pediatrics and pediatric palliative care, I established a new model for care that is looked to for its scientific standards and its unfolding potential. In the areas of sudden death, parental grief and serious illness, I try to identify, examine and support the strengths of patients and families, and seek improvements through respected clinical practice, serious research, and advocacy for new approaches.

Mary Greiner, MD, MS

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine

Dr. Greiner is a Professor of Pediatrics with Tenure at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and the Medical Director of the Comprehensive Health Evaluations for Cincinnati’s Kids (CHECK) Foster Care Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center specializing in foster care health.  Her research aims to understand the health risks of children with child welfare involvement and evaluate innovative healthcare delivery approaches for children in or at risk of entering foster care. Her ultimate goal is to optimize the wellbeing of all children and youth identified as high-risk due to child welfare involvement, in the areas of medical, dental, developmental, and mental health, from birth to transition to adulthood.

Dr. Greiner’s research focus is evaluating innovative approaches to delivering healthcare for children in or at risk of entering protective custody (e.g. foster care), and identifying which clinical interventions most help to improve health outcomes for these children. She has used her work with the CHECK Foster Care Center to inform her program of research in health issues for youth in foster care, including research in abusive head trauma, with specific interest in the role of diagnostic radiology to determine risk factors for retinal hemorrhages and evaluate mimics of abusive trauma, as well as looking at outcomes of children with abusive head injury. Her clinical care has also informed the study of issues related to health disparities for foster youth, including research examining knowledge of health among foster caregivers at the time youth are placed in their care and work examining health risks of adolescents in foster care. Through the CHECK Foster Care Center, she has been able to pilot and study interventions to address identified needs for youth in foster care, including traumatic stress prevention, developmental and behavioral evaluations, self-management of health for foster youth preparing to age out of foster care, substance use screening, and the role for improved information sharing with child welfare.

Kathryn Hamilton, PhD

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Hamilton earned her BA from Assumption College (Worcester, MA), her PhD from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC), and completed her postdoctoral training at University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine (Philadelphia, PA). She is currently an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Co-Director of the Gastrointestinal Epithelium Modeling Program, Division of Gastroenterology, Liver, and Nutrition at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Her independent laboratory was established in July, 2017, and focuses on understanding new cellular and molecular processes in intestinal epithelial cells in the contexts of regenerative medicine and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Dr. Hamilton’s laboratory specializes in understanding mechanisms regulating the intestinal epithelium in health and disease. They use in vivo models and 3D enteroid and colonoid (organoid) models to understand the molecular basis of intestinal regeneration, including in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Within these contexts, the Hamilton lab is interested in how RNA binding proteins impart global, post-transcriptional regulation of key pathways in intestinal stem cells. In addition, the lab generates organoid models using biopsy-derived stem cells from pediatric patients with IBD to study fundamental stem cell biology with the goal of developing much needed new therapies for patients.

Thomas Hays, MD, PhD

Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Dr. Hays studies the genetic basis of disease in newborns and seeks to establish how genetic diagnosis can be used to improve the care of newborns. He is an MD/PhD trained physician-scientist who completed his doctorate research studying the cellular and molecular basis of HIV-associated kidney disease. Following MD/PhD training, he followed his clinical interests into pediatrics, then neonatology. While in fellowship training, his research interests pivoted to genetics. He began mentored research training in the laboratory of Dr. Ali Gharavi, a world leader in the genetic basis of nephropathy. With Dr. Gharavi’s mentorship, Dr. Hays gained experience in statistics, epidemiology, and genomics. He sought to apply these methods to determine the genetic basis of diseases in newborns.

This research initially focused on the genetic contribution to congenital kidney anomalies. Newborns with congenital kidney anomalies experience a profound burden of critical illness and death. Studying this population served as an ideal bridge to independence, as it drew upon nephrology expertise from his mentor, but focused on Dr. Hays’s own clinical field of neonatology. Dr. Hays conducted exome sequencing of infants with congenital kidney anomalies and conducted epidemiologic studies of cohorts of such infants. Under Dr. Gharavi’s mentorship, Dr. Hays published a first-author review, a first-author publication in JAMA Network Open (2022), and multiple co-authored studies.

Dr. Hays then transitioned to independently study the genetic basis of other diseases in newborns including congenital heart disease and small for gestational age birth. He demonstrated the utility of rapid genome sequencing for infants with congenital heart disease (Hays…Chung, Circulation Genomic and Precision Medicine, 2023). He identified a novel cause of complex human congenital heart disease (Zhao…Hays, Prenatal Diagnosis, 2024). And, has multiple projects underway to determine the genetic contribution to small for gestational age birth. Dr. Hays’s work has been supported by a Thrasher Research Fund Early Career Award and a KL2 Career Development Award. And he is currently supported by a K23 Career Development Award, an NIH LRP Award, and a Precision Medicine Pilot Grant from the Columbia University Irving Institute. He leads an active lab including four students and a research coordinator.

Julia Heneghan, MD, MSHS

University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital

Dr. Heneghan received her medical degree from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She subsequently completed her pediatric residency training at Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital and subspecialty training in pediatric critical care at Children’s National Medical Center. During fellowship, Dr. Heneghan additionally earned a master’s of science in clinical and translational research from the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Dr. Heneghan’s research interests sit at the nexus of three important domains of critical care research: 1) measuring and understanding long-term outcomes following pediatric critical illness; 2) improving the ability to care for children with medical complexity during and after critical illness; and 3) implementing novel analytic techniques in pediatric critical care research.

Jeffrey Hine, PhD

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Dr. Hine has extensive experience across the fields of psychology and behavioral analysis and is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). He is also the Director of Primary Care Outreach and Training within the Division of Developmental Medicine and Vanderbilt Kennedy Center-TRIAD and co-leads the Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics residency rotation. Dr. Hine specializes in assessment and support of children with autism and other neurodevelopmental disabilities, as well as medical provider training within primary care settings. He is recognized nationally as a leader in developing and implementing novel models of service delivery and training, specifically through telemedicine and integration of medical homes. Dr. Hine is currently the Outreach and Training Lead on a HRSA-funded project that supports community primary care providers in learning strategies for within-practice assessment and support of autism.

Regarding scholarly activity, Dr. Hine has directed and published interdisciplinary research projects relating to streamlined and tele-diagnostic assessment of autism within primary care, integration of behavioral-health services into pediatric primary care practices, and pediatric provider education in developmental-behavioral pediatrics. Dr. Hine has received multiple awards related to innovative and collaborative teaching practices within medical education and has developed impactful workshops, toolkits, CME/MOC programs, and online leaning modules widely used to support providers in enhancing services for children with autism.

Rebecca Hough, MD, PhD

Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital

Dr. Rebecca Hough is a physician scientist focused on the molecular mechanisms of Acute Lung Injury (ALI), which causes The Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) in adults and children. She has deep expertise in lung physiology, live lung imaging, and mitochondrial function. Her clinical appointment is in Pediatric Critical Care and Hospitalist Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in NYC, where she regularly treats patients with Pediatric ARDS (PARDS). This informs her research questions. In Dr. Hough’s lab group, it is their goal to understand mechanisms of alveolar-capillary barrier failure as a key precipitating event in ALI. Critical to their approach is connecting studies of alveolar-capillary signaling in ALI to extra-pulmonary organ failure. They also aim to uncover the cellular subtypes involved and to interrogate how lung development impacts ALI and vice versa, with the overarching goal of informing precision therapies for ALI/ARDS in adults and children. They employ a combination of in vivo, live imaging, omics, and in vitro approaches to accomplish these objectives.

Dr. Hough is currently funded by a K08 from the NHLBI, and she has received multiple foundation grants to define alveolar-capillary injury signals in adult and juvenile mice. Her expertise is also demonstrated by her publication of two review articles focused on ALI: a basic science review on alveolar-capillary crosstalk mechanisms in Pulmonary Circulation and a clinical review on PARDS in Current Pediatrics Reports. Furthermore, Dr. Hough’s emergence as a thought leader in the field of lung endothelial biology is underlined by her invitation to be co-chairperson of the American Thoracic Society Workshop on the “Lung Endothelium in Health and Disease”, the goal of which is to increase rigor, reproducibility, and translatability in lung endothelial research. Dr. Hough is the first author (of 33 co-authors) on the resultant submitted publication.

Samantha House, DO, MPH

Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth-Hitchcock

Dr. House is a Pediatric Hospitalist and the Vice Chair of Quality and Safety for the Department of Pediatrics at Dartmouth Health Children’s. She completed her MPH at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice prior to attending medical school and through mentors associated with this program she began engaging in Health Services Research during her pediatric residency.

Since that time, her research has focused on the quality of care delivered to hospitalized children, with a primary focus on measuring and reducing overuse of healthcare services in this setting. Dr. House worked with a team from the Children’s Hospital Association and a number of clinical colleagues to develop a calculator measuring the delivery of low-value, or non-evidence-based, services within the Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS) database. Use of this tool has aided in understanding the impact of such care in participating hospitals and has elucidated novel information about pediatric hospital-based low-value care, including identification of temporal trends and evaluating differences in care delivery by level of childhood opportunity.

In 2024, Dr. House was selected as a Research Project Leader in the Dartmouth Health Center for Rural Health Care Delivery Science. Funded through the National Institute of General Medical Science, this support will facilitate Dr. House’s leadership of a project entitled  “Measuring pediatric hospital-based low-value care: Urban-rural disparities and associated downstream healthcare utilization,” which will expand her prior work on measuring low-value care to rural states using Medicaid data. She has also continued to perform analyses within the PHIS database and looks forward to utilizing available data to prioritize and guide deimplementation efforts.

John Ibrahim, MD

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

Dr John Ibrahim is an assistant professor of Pediatrics in the division of Newborn Medicine at UPMC since 2018. He completed his pediatric residency at NYU-Langone Long Island hospital in 2015. He then went to complete his Neonatal-Perinatal fellowship at University of Texas Southwestern, Dallas, in 2018. Dr Ibrahim has particular interest in the care of extremely premature neonates, Bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) and Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) and has several publications/book chapters in this regard. Dr Ibrahim is also the chair of the Golden hour program at UPMC Magee Womens’ Hospital as well as Co-Chair for Nasogastric (NG) feeds at Discharge program at both UPMC Magee Womens’ Hospital and UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Both programs have received national recognition and have been very successful. Dr Ibrahim carries ELSO certification for ECMO as well as clinical research certification from the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr Ibrahim is also the director of the POCUS program in the Newborn Medicine division at UPMC. In addition, he currently serves as a member of the IRB committee for the University of Pittsburgh and serves as a site Co-PI for several multicenter trials. He will assume the role of Director of Clinical Development and Quality Improvement, Division of Newborn Medicine, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center at both Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and Magee-Womens’ Hospital of UPMC.

Dr Ibrahim is the Chair of the Parent Advisory Panel for HOPE for HIE and CP foundation, part of the multicenter trial COOLPrime for mild HIE. He is a Co-PI for the several multicenter trials including the OptiSTART trial and COOLPrime trial. He is also the lead researcher for the research project: Criteria of ECMO candidacy and management in preterm infants with severe Chronic Lung Disease (CLD)/bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), leading a group of national and international neonatologists and pediatric intensivists to define practice variation in ECMO candidacy and management of infants with BPD, with the goal to convene an consensus group of experts from neonatologists and pediatric intensivists to come up with an expert consensus statement to guide ECMO use in this infant cohort. Dr Ibrahim has several grants for program development and implementation to advance clinical outcomes for premature neonates. He serves as a peer reviewer in several scientific journals and pediatric conferences.

Maya Iyer, MD, MEd

Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Ohio State University College of Medicine

Dr. Iyer is an Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine (OSUCOM)/Nationwide Children’s Hospital (NCH), pediatric emergency medicine physician, medical education researcher, and servant leader who is passionate about faculty development/faculty affairs, gender equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging, fostering lifelong learning, and developing current and future physicians, clinicians, and scientists. She holds three leadership at OSUCOM/NCH: 1) Assistant Dean for Clinical Faculty and 2) Associate Director of Women in Medicine and Science (WIMS) which rolls into the Directorship in January 2025, and 3) Director of Emergency Medicine Faculty Development. Her research expertise in medical education complements and she is invaluable to these leadership roles with regard to conducting needs assessments, program/curriculum development, test validity, and outcomes evaluation.

The central theme of Dr. Iyer’s medical education research career has been in faculty development and creating an inclusive work environment. During her pediatrics residency training, she completed a certificate in medical education through the Graduate Medical Education Scholars Program at the University of Michigan. Dr. Iyer’s early research in medical education involved obtaining validity evidence of Objective Structured Assessment Tools and also evaluating deliberate apprenticeship in acute care settings. Through these projects, she discovered her passion for medical education scholarship and sought out additional training including a certificate in medical education from the University of Michigan, graduate courses during her pediatric emergency medicine fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, and culminating in completing her Masters in Medical Education at the University of Cincinnati as faculty at The Ohio State University College of Medicine/Nationwide Children’s Hospital. As a junior faculty, Dr. Iyer investigated how procedural recommendations set forth by governing medical bodies align with what general pediatricians do in actual practice. This work led to her being selected as a Visiting Scholar for the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS), where she conducted more studies on procedural competency for general pediatricians. The papers resulting from this work helped inform changes to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s 2023 recommendation changes for procedural education for pediatric residents. Dr. Iyer’s medical education research also focuses on how pediatric emergency medicine can be taught and best practices for certification, as well as how workplace culture influences the career trajectories of women in medicine. Most recently, a large portion of her scholarship has focused on the impact of and how to disrupt bullying in academic medicine and has been funded by foundational grants. This work has led to several publications and international/national presentations at the Association of American Medical Colleges, American Women’s Medical Association, International Leadership Association, The Helfer Society, and The American College of Physicians. As a full-time practicing clinical faculty member, Dr. Iyer has authored 30 publications, three book chapters, given 21 national presentations, and over 100 local and regional presentations in the last seven years. She is currently working with prominent national foundations and programs on a soon to be funded grant to develop a civility program in medical schools. As Dr. Iyer continues to blend clinical practice with dedicated research and leadership, she is steadfast in her mission to enhance medical education, promote diversity and inclusion, and cultivate a supportive environment for the next generation of medical professionals through impactful research, program development, and innovation.

Viral Jain, MD

University of Alabama at Birmingham, Heersink School of Medicine, Children’s of Alabama

Dr. Viral Jain (Pronounce: vee – ruhl jein) has experience in both basic sciences as well as clinical research and has published extensively in well-respected journals. His primary area of interest is in the Developmental Origins of Health & Disorders (DOHaD) or how changes during the early period of in utero development influence life-long outcomes. He has identified a critical period of development during early gestation in humans where endocrine-disrupting chemicals act, leading to various urogenital developmental disorders. He then went on to study how intra-uterine inflammation or chorioamnionitis propagates, leading to preterm birth. He identified a critical mediator, IRAK1, which can serve as a potential therapeutic option to prevent inflammation associated preterm birth. His current work focuses on understanding the long-term adverse effects of chorioamnionitis and the associated immune dysfunction on lung and brain development. For his work, he has won multiple national and international research awards, including the prestigious David G Nathan Research Award from the Society of Pediatric Research, the Japan Pediatric Society Fellow award, and the Marshall Klaus Research Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).  His research is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Heart Association (AHA).

He is also interested in exploring the family’s contribution to young child’s learning and is the founder of TinyVoices – a patient advocacy program through which is founded nationally renowned NICU Bookworms, a NICU Infant Reading program. Dr. Jain has a strong interest in Bioinformatics and was the founding team member of a well-funded startup to connect sub-specialty services to underserved cities in India – which won numerous international awards for Healthcare Innovations. Dr. Jain is the founder and co-chair of the AAP Neonatology Journal Club. He is an active member of the AAP-SoNPM Executive Committee and heads the Reach Out & Read – NICU initiative.

He is also a children’s storybook writer, a musician, and has written storybooks for NICU infants as well as written songs with Grammy award winners for NICU families.

Ashley Jenkins, MD, MSc

University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Golisano Children’s Hospital at The University of Rochester Medical Center

Dr. Ashley Jenkins is an internal medicine and pediatric hospitalist and Assistant Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Rochester.  Her clinical and scholarly work span both pediatrics and medicine. The broad focus on her work is focused on improving equitable healthcare access and delivery, particularly in the hospital, for adolescents, young adults, and adults with childhood-onset conditions.

She is a growing leader in the field aiming to improve how we care for adolescents and young adults with childhood-onset conditions in both pediatric and adult hospitals. Through her research, Dr. Jenkins is identifying the stakeholders involved with, and barriers and facilitators to, high quality and patient-centered hospital care for adolescents and young adults with childhood-onset conditions. While completing a Med-Peds hospital medicine and a T32 National Research Service Award fellowship in Cincinnati, Dr Jenkins found that most transitional care efforts were inadequate and often dissolved due to dependence on one person, lack of adult care models, or inability to show financial value. As a Med-Peds hospitalist, she was alarmed that patients with sickle cell disease under 18 years were more likely to be hospitalized in an adult hospital (versus a pediatric hospital), compared to those with other childhood-onset conditions like cystic fibrosis. This meant that patients with sickle cell disease were less likely to receive the age- and condition-appropriate care they should have been getting, compared to people with cystic fibrosis.

With a current focus on patients with sickle cell, she is now grant funded to use a mixed methods research and implementation science approach to adapt individualized care plans from the emergency department setting to inpatient care for both children and adults living with sickle cell disease. This foundational work traverses pediatric and adult care and will further inform how inpatient care should fit within the larger pediatric to adult healthcare transition process.

Julia Johnson, MD, PhD

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Dr. Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Neonatology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, with a joint appointment in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Johnson first came to Johns Hopkins in July 2010 and completed her residency in Pediatrics (2010-2013) and her fellowship in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine (2013-2017) prior to joining the faculty. Dr. Johnson completed a PhD in Clinical Investigation at Johns Hopkins. She matriculated in 2016 as a fellow, extending fellowship for a year with the support of a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) T32. She completed her PhD in 2020; her thesis focused on epidemiology of neonatal sepsis and reduction of healthcare-associated infection risk in neonates admitted to the NICU in India. As a fellow and faculty member, Dr. Johnson led three Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supported studies in Pune, India: (1) a prospective cohort study that enrolled over 9000 neonates admitted to three NICUs in Pune, India, and described epidemiology of neonatal sepsis and antimicrobial resistance; (2) a quasi-experimental study that adapted the Hopkins-developed Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program to low-resource NICUs in India to improve infection prevention and control practices and reduce healthcare-associated infection risk; and (3) a prospective cohort study that enrolled pregnant women with risk factors for neonatal sepsis to describe the role of maternal, neonatal, and environmental colonization in neonatal bloodstream infection risk.

This work served as the foundation for Dr. Johnson’s K23 submission, as well as an ongoing CDC-supported study to describe the role of the maternal and neonatal microbiome in neonatal infection risk. Prior to being a K23 awardee, Dr. Johnson was selected as a finalist for the Society for Pediatric Research (SPR) Bridging to Success Award, on the merit of her submitted K23 application. Her first K23 submission was funded as a five-year award by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in June 2020 and supports her research in epidemiology of neonatal sepsis and infection prevention in low-resource settings.

Dr. Johnson has served as a technical expert for a Gates Foundation-supported and CDC-led landscape analysis of neonatal infection prevention as well as a CDC-led development of a prevention tool for neonatal bloodstream infections in low-resource settings. In addition to her internationally based research, Dr. Johnson collaborates with faculty in the Division of Neonatology and Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases on multiple studies focused on neonatal and pediatric infections. She is a co-investigator of an ongoing randomized controlled trial assessing the impact of a nasal microbiome transplant on neonatal infection risk in the NICU, as well as a CDC Prevention Epicenter-supported multi-center study on neonatal hospital-onset bacteremia.

Lindsay Johnston, MD, MEd, CHSE, FAAP

Yale School of Medicine

Dr. Lindsay Johnston is an attending neonatologist and Professor of Pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine, where she has been employed on the Clinician-Educator Scholar track since 2009.  She is the Director of Fellowships in Pediatrics at Yale, and Associate Director of the Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine (NPM) fellowship program.  She has a master’s degree in Medical Education, and has focused her academic efforts on educational research (including simulation-based medical education, with specialized interest in procedural skills training and curriculum development and assessment (specifically in the development of flipped classroom and simulation-based educational materials)).  She has collaborated with educators across the globe, having participated in the leadership of the International Pediatric Simulation Society (previously served as society president), the Organization of Neonatology Training Program Directors (previous Executive Committee member), the APA simulation interest group (previous SIG Co-Chair), the simulation workgroup of the Educational Committee of the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization, and the executive committee of the National Neonatology Curriculum Committee.  She is an engaged and active leader in the community of residency/ fellowship educators, and is currently on the Fellowship Executive Committee for the Association of Pediatric Program Directors.

She has published extensively (manuscripts, books, and online educational resources) in the areas of her educational research, including simulation-based procedural training and assessment, use of simulation-based methodologies to train ECMO teams, curriculum development for neonatology fellowship programs, and strategies to improve success and safety in neonatal airway management.  Additionally, she is Yale’s NICU site PI in the international NEAR4NEOS collaborative, which utilizes quality improvement strategies to optimize safety and success of neonatal intubation.

LaQuita Jones, DO

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

Shilpa Kalane, MBBS, DNB Pediatrics, DrNB Neonatology

Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital, Pune, Maharashtra, India

In 2013, I completed my three-year subspecialty training in neonatology. Following the completion of the training, I have served as a senior consultant, honorary consultant, and consultant in neonatology at a tertiary-level NICU. Under the expert guidance of Dr. Uday Devaskar, I had the opportunity to participate in an observership at UCLA. I have been appointed as the Director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital (DMH) in 2021. The NICU at DMH is a level IIIB accredited unit. I serve as a mentor for the paediatric residency programme and neonatology fellowship programme in India. I am also involved in training of resident physicians and nurses.

I have authored 38 articles that have been published in peer-reviewed journals. These include original papers, case series, and case reports. Perinatology, neonatal nutrition, and infections comprise my research interests. A substantial part of my research is hypothesis-driven and includes randomized control trials, observational and experimental studies. I had the opportunity of authoring fifteen book chapters. I have recently coauthored a chapter in the 2024 South Asian Edition of the Cloherty and Stark Manual of Neonatal Care. I had the honor to co-author a book chapter with Dr Uday Devaskar on a chapter on Neonatal Ketone Metabolism for the upcoming edition of Fetal and Neonatal Physiology (Polin and Fox). Furthermore, I was granted the privilege of reviewing abstracts for PAS from 2020 to 2022.

Judith Kelsen, MD, MTR

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Kelsen is a clinical and translational investigator whose work is focused on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and very early onset IBD (VEO-IBD).  The field of VEO-IBD was only established towards the end of her Gastroenterology fellowship through a novel genetic discovery made in an infant with refractory IBD. This discovery transformed the field and her life. VEO-IBD is the most severe form of IBD, previously with minimal, if any, viable medical therapies. Clinical and supportive care was the most we could offer to these children.

As she learned more about the disease, she realized that a gastroenterologist alone could not unravel the pathogenesis nor devise the therapies to target the diverse range of causative pathways. Therefore, she developed and is the Director of the VEO-IBD Center at CHOP and leads a multidisciplinary team of physicians and scientists who work together to analyze genomic architecture, immune dysregulation, epithelial function and intestinal microbes in children with VEO-IBD. The team’s clinical observations served as the foundation of their research program. Due to the early age of onset, aggressive and refractory nature of the disease in these children as compared to IBD that develops in older children and adults, Dr. Kelsen hypothesized that monogenic and oligogenic defects are responsible for a significant subset of VEO-IBD and that the biological effects of the identified variants can be characterized and validated by a collaborative approach. The team has focused on exploring the genetic underpinnings of this disease using our novel bioinformatic pipelines to whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS) data. Thus far, Dr. Kelsen and her team have identified >70 monogenic defects in patients with VEO-IBD, including genes not previously associated with IBD or human disease. They have integrated transcriptomic data, including bulk and single cell RNA sequencing with genomic data and have discovered additional causative genetic defects. They are now including epigenomic data as part of the multi-omic approach to identify novel pathways involved in the disease and therapeutic targets. Dr. Kelsen and the team developed the translational pipelines to collect, process and generate the data for the above experiments.

Together, these findings have resulted in successful precision medicine approaches. In some cases, such as those who underwent stem cell transplantation, patients were cured of their disease. Her team cares for the largest single center cohort of patients who underwent stem cell transplant for the indication of IBD and have demonstrated excellent results.

In parallel with human genetic studies, Dr. Kelsen’s team is also investigating intestinal microbes (gut microbiome) and the dysregulated immune response to these microbes in children with VEO-IBD. In addition, she hypothesizes that this alteration correlates with specific genetic variants the team has identified.

To facilitate Dr. Kelsen’s translational research program, she established the VEO-IBD Registry at CHOP, which includes >2000 probands and their parents with a biorepository of dense metadata and associated biospecimens linking clinical, genomic and functional analyses, and microbiome sequencing. This repository has also served as a rich resource to interrogate new questions and for research studies and as a resource for her trainees.

Dr. Kelsen’s ultimate goal is to change the trajectory of VEO-IBD by providing new treatment strategies for these children who currently have no viable therapeutic options.

Brian King, MD

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School

Brian King MD is an Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Academic Neonatologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He completed medical school at the University of California, San Diego, pediatric residency at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City and neonatology fellowship at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, Texas. His scholarly work focuses on improving the value of neonatal care, through economic evaluations and studies exploring resource utilization and practice variability. He also has expertise in evidence-based medicine, particularly evidence synthesis and dissemination.

Dr. King prior research work has used large billing databases to explore variability in resource utilization among preterm infants. This work was done to inform quality improvement and future comparative effectiveness research by prioritizing practices that are costly and highly variable. He has also collaborated with other Neonatologists at US Children’s Hospitals to conduct multicenter comparative effectiveness research. He continues a focus on value-based care and health economics. Ongoing investigations include an individual patient data meta-analysis of out-of-pocket costs for families enrolled in neonatal trials, and he is the PI for economic evaluations alongside the PIVOTAL trial and CoolPrime Study.

Brian also has expertise in evidence-based medicine, specifically with a focus on dissemination and critical appraisal. He serves on the steering committee for the AAP SONPM Journal Club Webinar series. He is a board member and social media lead for The International Society for Evidence-based Neonatology (EBNEO), an international non-profit that focuses promoting evidence-based practice through improving dissemination of clinical research. He is a co-investigator on the NeoCANON project, a comprehensive review of clinical trials and their methodology in Neonatology.

Jessica Knight, MPH, PhD

University of Georgia

As an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at University of Georgia, my expertise is in epidemiologic methods and pediatric and chronic disease epidemiology. I apply these to my research through the use of causal statistical methods to better understand cardiovascular health in childhood and its subsequent effects across the lifespan. During my doctoral dissertation and post-doctoral training, I worked under pediatric cardiologists at Emory University to investigate the sequelae of health outcomes for children surgically treated for congenital heart disease. I have maintained these collaborations with many of my publications investigating clinical and quality of life outcomes for children with congenital heart disease. Many of these incorporate the Pediatric Cardiac Care Consortium dataset funded by NIH to assess the long-term implications of clinical characteristics and surgical techniques for various types of CHD. I serve as a lead statistician in this research group. Recognizing that some features of living with CHD, like physical and emotional stress, are also relevant to the general population with acquired risk factors for heart disease, I have begun to apply my knowledge of pediatric cardiovascular health to high-risk youth without birth defects.

Nicholas Kuzma, MD

Drexel University College of Medicine, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children

Yonit Lax, MD

Maimonides Infants and Children’s Hospital of Brooklyn, State University of New York Downstate Medical Center College of Medicine

Yonit Lax, MD is Chief of Pediatric Community Health and an Attending Physician in the Divisions of General Pediatrics, Hospital Medicine, and Population Health at Maimonides Children’s Hospital, and an Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at SUNY Downstate Medical Center. Dr. Lax attended The George Washington University Honors Program at the Elliott School of International Affairs where she concentrated on Global Health, graduating Summa Cum Laude with Phi Beta Kappa enrollment. She received her post-baccalaureate in premedical studies at The Johns Hopkins University, and acquired her Doctor of Medicine from The George Washington University School of medicine where she was made a member of the Gold Humanism Honors Society. Dr. Lax then completed an internship, residency, and chief residency in Social Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore where she received the Chairman’s Award for Distinction in Research, the Daniel Leicht Award for Outstanding Achievement, and was inducted into the Leo Davidoff Society for Excellence in Teaching.

Dr. Lax’s research focus centers on social determinants of health screening and referrals, integrated mental health, and medical education. To support this work, Dr. Lax has been a recipient of several grants.  While at Montefiore these grants were from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Association of Pediatric Program Directors to start a curriculum on advocacy for pediatric residents and medical students.  Since being at Maimonides Dr. Lax has been the principal investigator for two HRSA Healthy Tomorrow Grants that integrate mental health into primary care- one which focuses on school age children and one on early childhood and the recipient of the Maimonides Research and Development Foundation Grant for her research on Social and Emotional Needs for Children Before and During COVID 19. This year, as a grant recipient from SAHMSA and NY OMH, Dr. Lax founded  the Brooklyn Parenting Center- an integrated program of social and emotional care across the first thousand days of life.  Dr. Lax is this year’s inaugural APA Co-Chair of the SDOH special interest group, and has given workshops, talks, and presented research nationally.

Thuy Mai Luu, MD, MSc

Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Sainte-Justine, University of Montreal

Dr Thuy Mai Luu is a pediatrician and the medical director of CHU Sainte-Justine Neonatal Follow-Up Program in Montreal. She is also the director of the Canadian Neonatal Follow-Up Network, a research network including the 26 neonatal follow-up programs across Canada. She is a senior clinical research scholar from the Quebec Health Research Funds. Her research focuses on long-term neurodevelopmental and physical health outcomes following preterm birth, from infancy to adulthood, looking at risk and resiliency factors along with best screening strategies to enhance clinical follow-up. She is also studying parent-important outcomes in the context of preterm birth research.

Melissa Mannion, MD, MSPH

University of Alabama at Birmingham, Heersink School of Medicine

Dr. Mannion is a pediatric rheumatologist and clinical researcher. Her primary research interests are in epidemiologic and decision making analysis related to the treatment of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA).  Specifically, she is interested in the use of medications to treat JIA, the outcomes of JIA, and the comparative effectiveness of treatment modalities.

Ivana Maric, PhD

Stanford University School of Medicine

Ivana Maric is an Assistant Professor in the Pediatrics Department at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on applying machine learning to improving maternal and neonatal health. Her main focus has been on developing machine learning models for early prediction of adverse outcomes of pregnancy from omics and electronic health records data, that could guide development of low-cost, point of care diagnostic tools. Her main interest is in solutions that are applicable worldwide and especially in low-resource settings. Previously, her research focused on information theory, a mathematical discipline tightly related to statistics and machine learning. She is a recipient of the 2021 Rosenkranz Prize awarded for innovative work to improve health in low- or middle-income countries. She is also a co-recipient of the 2013 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award.

Ronit Marom, MD, PhD

Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital

Dr. Ronit Marom is an Assistant Professor of Molecular and Human Genetics and a physician-scientist at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM). She earned her M.D./Ph.D. degree from Tel Aviv University, including a year-long visit to the NIH as part of her graduate research training. She completed her Pediatric residency at Tel Aviv Medical Center, followed by Medical Genetics residency and Medical Biochemical Genetics fellowship at BCM. During her post-doctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Brendan Lee she investigated the mechanism of osteogenesis imperfecta type V.

Dr. Marom’s current research focus is on the interconnection between collagen biology, endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-Golgi trafficking, and skeletal dysplasias. Her group is studying genetic defects in the secretory pathway that are associated with bone fragility, including COPB2-related juvenile osteoporosis and KIF5B-related osteogenesis imperfecta. Her research is funded by a NIH/NICHD K08 career development award. In addition, she is the recipient of the Caroline Wiess Law Scholar award at BCM.

Corrie McDaniel, DO

University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle Children’s

Corrie McDaniel completed her medical school at Midwestern University and went on to complete her residency in Pediatrics at Advocate Health Children’s Hospital. She is now a board-certified pediatric hospitalist with Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington.

Dr. McDaniel’s research centers around improving outcomes for children hospitalized in non-children’s hospitals. She has collaborated nationally with hospitals to improve quality and timeliness of care, with an emphasis in both implementation and deimplementation measures. She led a multi-site international collaborative with 109 participating hospitals on febrile infants (REVISE II) through the AAP’s Pediatric Acute and Critical Care Quality Network. Dr. McDaniel was then awarded the Seattle Children’s Research Institute’s Clinical Research Scholars Program through which she developed the PHASE measure, a parent-reported quality measure to capture the hospital-to-home transition experience for families.

Currently, Dr. McDaniel has funding through AHRQ to investigate hospital, community, and system-level factors associated with sustainability of inpatient pediatric care in rural hospitals. The inability for children to receive definitive general pediatric inpatient care within rural communities creates inequities in quality and access to care. Addressing these inequities for children in the setting of scarce resources and limited infrastructure requires health policy change and innovative initiatives designed with and specifically for the rural community.

Meghan McGarry, MD, MS

University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle Children’s

Dr. Meghan McGarry is a Board-Certified Pediatrician and Pediatric Pulmonologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine with training in clinical research and clinical pharmacology. Dr. McGarry is a leader in health disparities research in Black and Hispanic children with cystic fibrosis. She has 29 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of cystic fibrosis and health disparities. She is a passionate advocate for people with cystic fibrosis and health equity.

Dr. McGarry recognized there was little to no research on Hispanic children with cystic fibrosis and has conducted the critical research describing stark disparities. She found that Hispanic children have significantly lower pulmonary function than non-Hispanic white children with cystic fibrosis. Dr. McGarry found this disparity is twice as wide in children on the West Coast compared to the rest of the United States. She found that Hispanic children with cystic fibrosis were at increased risk of pulmonary infections, increased risk of converting to more severe forms of the infections, and acquired the infections at a younger age compared to non-Hispanic white children. Her research now focuses on investigating what factors are contributing to these disparities.

Dr. McGarry also conducts research on how tests and therapies based on cystic fibrosis gene variants contribute to disparities. As cystic fibrosis variant frequency varies by race and ethnicity, she found that Asian, Black, and Hispanic children with cystic fibrosis were more likely to be missed on newborn screening due to the variants that were tested. Her work and advocacy have led to multiple states changing their newborn screening protocols by expanding the variants tested. Dr. McGarry has also investigated how Asian, Black and Hispanic children with cystic fibrosis are less likely to qualify for disease-altering medications (CFTR modulators) due to having different CF genetic variants.

Sandra McKay, MD, MSc

McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

Dr Sandra McKay is a general pediatrician and an associate professor in pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, where she serves as the Vice Chair for Advocacy and the Division Chief for Community and General Pediatrics. Her research interests are in injury prevention, specifically in firearm injury prevention, and she serves as the principal investigator for the Injury Free Coalition for Kids Houston site. Her NIH funding includes conducting a randomized controlled trial for a hospital based violence intervention program, and developing secure firearm storage counseling methods and messaging for firearm owners in multiple settings. She is also the director for the pediatric population health initiative, where she focuses on community based participatory research approaches to reduce health disparities. She is also a nonresident fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy where she collaborates as a health policy analyst and explores the intersection of research and policy.

Jana Mike, MD, PhD

UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine

Dr. Mike’s research focuses on defining novel pathways and therapeutic approaches for hypoxic-ischemic brain injury (HI) in critically ill pediatric patients. Dr. Mike’s work is structured around three primary areas within HI pathobiology. The first area involves identifying neuroinflammatory and neuroprotective pathways activated post-HI, particularly focusing on the arginase pathway and its role in microglia-mediated efferocytosis and brain fibrosis. This research has been recognized with multiple awards and supported by a K08 grant to explore arginase-1 dependent mechanisms further.  The second area of Dr. Mike’s research addresses the development of neurotherapeutics tailored for low-resource settings where HI affects a significant number of neonates. Dr. Mike has pioneered the use of a large animal model at Maltepe Lab to simulate human HI conditions, facilitating biomarker discovery and evaluation of potential neurotherapies like azithromycin, clemastine, and caffeine.  In collaboration with the Wang Lab at UC Davis, Dr. Mike’s third area of interest focuses on defining the pharmacometrics of extracellular vesicles, particularly placental mesenchymal stem cell-derived EVs (PMSC-EVs), for treating neonatal brain HI. This project aims to characterize biodistribution and evaluate the therapeutic potential of PMSC-EVs, previously successful in meningomyelocele repair.

Kelsey Miller, MD

Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Kelsey Miller is a clinical and educational researcher. Her clinical research focuses primarily on pediatric emergency airway management, as well as on pediatric sedation. Dr. Miller seeks to understand and improve airway management for pediatric patients in the emergency department through a combination of clinical research, educational innovation, and quality improvement. She is an executive member of the National Emergency Airway Registry for Pediatric Emergency Medicine and co-directs the registry’s Manuscript Oversight Committee.

Dr. Miller also has a strong interest in health professions education, contributing to scholarship at the undergraduate and graduate medical education level. She has been involved in a diversity of education-related research efforts including procedural education, technology-enhanced education, and interprofessional education. Dr. Miller is currently pursuing a PhD in Health Professions Education through Maastricht University, with a focus on interprofessional workplace learning.

Jonathan Mitchell, MSc, PhD

University of Pennsylvania, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

The prevalence of obesity has doubled in Dr, Mitchell’s lifetime and this rise has put millions at increased risk of developing cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes. Similarly, osteoporosis is among the leading chronic diseases afflicting the nation and over $17 billion is spent each year treating fragility fracture. To help address the health challenges posed by obesity and osteoporosis, the overarching goal of Dr. Mitchell’s research is to help prevent chronic diseases in later life, by focusing on energetic behaviors (sleep, diet, and physical activity) and their impact on body composition during growth and development.

Dr. Mitchell’s independently funded research program is supported by the NIH and benefits from strong interdisciplinary collaboration, undergraduate- and graduate-level trainees, and engagement with research participants and their extended family in the community. His laboratory has two inter-related units. The Unit for Energetic Behavior Research is structured to support multidisciplinary epidemiological studies using a) sensors to measure locomotor activity, b) advanced imaging to measure body composition, c) detailed nutritional assessment to measure energy intake and dietary behavior, d) geospatial methods to measure the neighborhood environment, and e) DNA collection for gene-behavior interaction analyses. The Unit for Optimizing Behavioral Interventions uses the Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST) framework to design digital interventions to improve energetic behavior profiles in childhood. MOST is an engineer-inspired framework for developing multi-component interventions consisting of three phases: 1) preparation phase, to pilot test intervention components; 2) optimization phase, to determine the optimal candidate component settings using optimization trials; and 3) evaluation phase, to determine if the final optimized intervention package is effective using randomized controlled trials.

Dr. Mitchell has contributed extensively to the academic community at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), and to the wider community through national leadership roles. He is a member of CHOP’s Center for Human Phenomic Science Resource Review Committee (2020-present). Leveraging his expertise in digital health, he is a Director of the Digital Health Innovation Core at CHOP (2020-present) and is a member of CHOP’s Digital and Technology Innovation Working Group (2022-present). Nationally, and given his expertise in physical activity, he chaired the Pediatric Committee for the American College of Sports Medicine’s Exercise is Medicine initiative (2018-2021) and was a member of the Healthcare Work Group for the Physical Activity and Health Innovation Collaborative of the Roundtable on Obesity Solutions at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2020-2021). In addition, he is an Associate Editor at Sleep Health (2023-present) and an Editorial Board Member at Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise (2020-present).

Carmen Monthe-Dreze, MD

Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Dr. Monthé-Drèze is an attending neonatologist in the Department of Pediatrics and Division of Newborn Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston, MA) and an Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. In addition to caring for sick neonates in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Dr. Monthé-Drèze conducts clinical and translational research on the effects of maternal pregnancy heath on child outcomes. Her specific interests are on the effects of maternal obesity and dietary quality on child growth and neurodevelopment, with a focus on inflammatory mechanisms which may underpin these associations.  Using longitudinal observational cohorts, she has characterized the impact of in utero exposure to maternal obesity and poor dietary quality on offspring adiposity, growth trajectories, brain, and neurodevelopment, and has investigated the mechanistic role of maternal obesity-related dysmetabolism (e.g., inflammation, glucose intolerance, altered fatty acid profiles) using omics approaches, neuroimaging, and advanced biostatistical methods. Given the neurodevelopmental programming effects of maternal obesity and the critical role of neural circuits in regulating eating behaviors, Dr. Monthé-Drèze’s long-term goal is to define neurobiobehavioral mechanisms of intergenerational obesity specifically during the first 1,000 days, a sensitive period for obesity development in children. She hopes her innovative investigation into the neurocognitive basis of intergenerational obesity will translate into new targets for interventions during the first 1,000 days, starting in pregnancy, to improve child health outcomes.  Her research activities have been supported by the American Academics of Pediatrics, The National Institutes of Health, the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Harvard, and the Harvard Medical School Diversity and Inclusion Community Partnership Faculty Fellowship. In addition to her research activities, Dr. Monthé-Drèze co-directs the Nutrition and Obesity Research Centers’ INSPIRE Program, an NIDDK-sponsored national initiative which aims to promote the career development of early career scientists working in obesity, nutrition, and metabolism research.

Dr. Monthé-Drèze is originally from Cameroon, Central Africa. She received her undergraduate degree in Biology and Child Psychology from Swarthmore College and her Medical Degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She completed her residency in Pediatrics and fellowship in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at the Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Combined programs where she served as Chief Fellow before joining the faculty at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Amanda Muir, MD, MTR

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Muir’s clinical and research goal is to improve the lives of children with eosinophilic gastrointestinal disease and prevent the devastating consequences of eosinophilic inflammation including weight loss feeding disorders, dysphagia and esophageal stricture.  Following training in general pediatrics,  a strong foundation in mucosal immunology led to a natural interest in pediatric gastroenterology, in which perturbations in the balance between environmental factors and host innate immune responses have a profound impact upon human growth and development. Among its many complications, disruptions in the esophageal epithelial homeostasis is the most striking histologic feature of eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE).  Dr. Muir has been able to grow expertise in esophageal epithelial biology and 3-D culture systems.  Using primary culture methods, she has developed an esophageal organoid platform to recapitulate the EoE microenviroment and has been able to utilize this model to understand the role of the esophageal epithelium in propagating inflammation and fibrosis.  She has been able to build a robust platform for biobanking, growing primary organoid, air liquid interface and organotypic cultures, and performing in depth genetic and transcriptomic evaluations.  In addition to this disease modeling in vitro, Dr. Muir also has a clinical research portion of her lab. A major knowledge gap in the field of EoE is how to identify esophageal fibrosis prior to the onset of a frank stricture. She has pioneered the use of a novel tool, the endoluminal function imaging probe or EndoFLIP, in clinical and research practice in the pediatric GI community. EndoFLIP uses high-resolution impedance planimetry to determine the pressure-geometry relationship or distensibility of the esophagus. Using this tool, she has found that EoE patients have decreased esophageal distensibility compared to healthy non-EoE controls. Furthermore, this difference is exacerbated by disease complications including esophageal fibrosis and food impactions.

Jennifer Munoz Pareja, MD

Holtz Children’s Hospital Jackson Memorial Hospital, University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine

The overarching goal of my laboratory is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the diverse pathomechanisms contributing to adverse outcomes in pediatric acute brain injury. We strive to identify specific biomarkers that can be employed as objective measures for assessing the severity of pediatric acute brain injury, as well as predicting patient outcomes. Recognizing neuroinflammation as a central pathophysiological aspect of acute brain injury and acknowledging that a limited understanding of the intricate cellular and molecular sequelae has hindered previous translational efforts, my current focus centers around studying the role of the inflammasome in the innate immune response following injury. By accomplishing this, we aim to enhance our ability to evaluate injury severity and provide valuable prognostic and therapeutic information to this vulnerable population.

Rachel Myers, MS, PhD

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania

Rachel Myers, PhD, MS is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Associate Director of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She serves as Co-Director of the Violence Intervention Program within CHOP’s Center for Violence Prevention. Dr. Myers is a public health researcher focused on ameliorating disparities in pediatric intentional and unintentional injuries and recovery. In her work, she addresses the epidemiology of pediatric injuries and evaluation of hospital-based and community-focused programming to support injury prevention and recovery among children, adolescents, and their families. Dr. Myers bridges the academic-practice divide, employing community-engaged research methods to support and sustain the development, implementation, and evaluation of injury prevention efforts and participate in the co-development of tools and approaches to demonstrate program impact. Her work focuses on defining strengths-based and resiliency-focused outcomes and the inclusion of youth, family, staff, provider, and community partner perspectives.

Dr. Myers employs both qualitative and quantitative methodologies in her research to address pressing pediatric and adolescent injury-related topics, including violent injury, post-traumatic stress recovery, and child and adolescent motor vehicle safety. Her research has helped to define psychosocial recovery trajectories and needs among violently injured children and their families, identified opportunities and resources necessary to support implementation and evaluation of trauma-informed hospital- and community-based violence prevention programs, identified disparities in child passenger restraint use, and identified the need for resources supporting autistic adolescents learning to drive. Throughout her research, Dr. Myers engages in multidisciplinary collaborations to ensure her work is relevant for community members, healthcare providers, other service providers, young people, and families. Her work has been supported by funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Justice, as well as state and foundation funders.

Nidhya Navanandan, MD, MS

Children’s Hospital Colorado, University of Colorado School of Medicine

Nidhya Navanandan is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and pediatric emergency medicine physician at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Dr. Navanandan received her undergraduate and medical degrees at Northwestern University. She completed pediatric residency at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine at Children’s Hospital of Colorado. She received a Masters of Science in Clinical Science from the University of Colorado and has been faculty at the University of Colorado and Children’s Hospital of Colorado since 2016. Dr. Navanandan’s research is focused on developing biomarkers and therapeutics to improve emergency care for pediatric asthma exacerbations. Her current NIH/NHLBI K23-funded research examines the role of novel biologic and physiologic markers in characterizing severity and predicting treatment response for children with asthma exacerbations in the emergency department (ED). Existing ED clinical pathways use a standard, “one-size-fits-all” approach in the treatment of children with acute exacerbations. However, asthma is a heterogeneous disease warranting a more precise approach to improve clinical outcomes. Dr. Navanandan’s work aims to leverage an improved understanding of an individual’s biologic and physiologic response to therapies to inform biomarker-directed, individualized asthma therapy, a paradigm shift in the ED management of acute exacerbations. At a national level, Dr. Navanandan is a research Co-Investigator for the NIH/NIAID-sponsored Childhood Asthma in Urban Settings (CAUSE) Network and the Neutrophilic Mechanisms of Injury and Repair in Lung Disease (Neu-Lung) Consortium, and a member of the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) Respiratory Working Group.

Brett Nelson, MD, MPH, DTM&H, FAAP

MassGeneral Hospital for Children, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Brett Nelson’s research focuses on medical education, global health, and addressing the needs of vulnerable populations. This work has involved leading large-scale training programs across several low- and middle-income countries to reduce newborn, child, and maternal health in disrupted-affected settings. His extensive body of research primarily evaluates and improves healthcare systems in resource-limited areas. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, he has assessed healthcare needs and outcomes in post-conflict regions, developed and evaluated innovative training packages for frontline health workers, and explored the psychological impacts of war on emergency department patients. Dr. Nelson’s contributions also include significant insights into global health education, the impact of conflict on HIV/AIDS, and the effectiveness of low-cost medical interventions for maternal and neonatal care. His efforts aim to enhance healthcare delivery and outcomes in vulnerable populations, bridging gaps in training and resources to address critical global health challenges.

Deepak Palakshappa, MD, MS

Wake Forest School of Medicine of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center

Deepak Palakshappa, MD MSHP is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics and the Department of Epidemiology and Prevention at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Dr. Palakshappa’s research focuses on improving the health outcomes of populations that have been socially and economically disadvantaged, specifically by addressing food insecurity and social determinants of health. Treating patients of all ages has given him a unique perspective on improving the health of low-income families through innovative tools and population-based approaches to achieve health equity. Over the past 10 years, he has focused on understanding how to screen and address food insecurity and other social risk factors in clinical care settings through innovative team-based care models using mobile technology, in-person navigation (with community health workers and patient navigators), and partnerships with community-based organizations  Dr. Palakshappa completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital after receiving his MD from the University of Alabama School of Medicine and a BS in biology and psychology from Birmingham-Southern College.  He completed a General Academic Pediatrics Fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and received a Master’s of Science in Health Policy Research from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He is currently supported by a Career Development Award (K23) from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute focusing on the effect of food insecurity on cardiovascular health.

Anita Patel, MD

Children’s National Health System, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences

Anita K Patel MD is a Pediatric Critical Care attending at Children’s National Health System (CNHS), Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences (GW-SOM), K23 Awardee through the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development scholar, and a former scholar of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) KL2 program through the Children’s National-George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences Center for Translational Sciences. Her education, training, and research reflect her sustained efforts to improve inpatient pediatric outcomes and reduce sedation and analgesia associated morbidity in critically ill children through her expertise in data sciences and clinical research.

Research activities have been integral to Dr. Patel’s education since high school, gradually transitioning from laboratory to clinical and data science research as her career has matured. In high school, Dr. Patel participated in a laboratory science-based NIH training program. She continued laboratory research during her undergraduate studies, completing an honors thesis in neuroscience studying Tuberous Sclerosis Complex at the University of Pennsylvania. During this time, she also received a NIH Cancer Research Training Award for clinical trials focused on pediatric glioblastoma multiforme and spent two years as a research coordinator for obesity-related clinical trials. Dr. Patel’s research focus during residency and fellowship built on her interest in Neurosciences, focusing on sedation and analgesia related morbidity with a specific interest in pediatric ICU delirium. During residency at Weill Cornell-New York Presbyterian Hospital, she was co-investigator in the development and validation of a delirium screening tool, the Cornell Assessment of Pediatric Delirium (CAPD), that is currently used nationally and internationally. The CAPD is now part of the European Society for Pediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care. During her fellowship at Columbia-New York Presbyterian Hospital, her delirium research continued, resulting in a Star Research Presentation Award at the Society for Critical Care Medicine annual conference and the first publication describing the prevalence and risk factors for delirium in pediatric cardiac ICU patients.

As an attending, Dr. Patel’s interest in sedation and analgesia related morbidity aligned with a burgeoning interest in and aptitude for data science as a research methodology. She has leveraged her data science skills to develop a computable phenotype for iatrogenic withdrawal which is currently being finalized for publication. This computable phenotype uses vital signs and medication data already present in the electronic health record to classify a patient as exhibiting withdrawal (or not) following mechanical ventilation with the need for a dedicated nursing assessment. Dr. Patel’s interest in inpatient hospitalization outcomes was born through her involvement in her mentor, Murray Pollack MD, where she helped develop the Criticality Index – the first of its kind machine learning algorithm that predicts both severity of illness every 6 hours for every hospitalized patient, and their risk of mortality ever 3 hours for ICU patients. This work has resulted in greater than 10 publications and garnered the interest of her hospital, Children’s National, where she is leading an effort to implement and ultimately study the Criticality Index algorithms for patient care. Dr. Patel’s dedication to research led her to co-found a hospital wide CTSA special interest group called “Docs in Data Science” which holds monthly meetings dedicated to educating physician researchers pursuing data science research and promote cross collaboration. Additionally, Dr. Patel was named the co-Director of Research in the Division of Pediatric Critical Care due to her involvement in mentoring over 10 fellows and residents during the last 8 years as an attending at Children’s National. Her commitment to furthering pediatric research is born from her deep desire to help patients; she firmly believes that all physicians have a responsibility to leave the medical field better than when they entered it. Data science will impact medicine greatly in the coming decades; Dr. Patel has honed her data science and research skills so that she can ensure physicians have a voice in how AI algorithms are integrated into patient care.

Shilpa Patel, MD, MPH

George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Children’s National Health System

Dr. Shilpa Patel is the medical director for the IMPACT DC Asthma Clinic, a matrixed program of care aimed at improving asthma outcomes for children. She is also an attending physician in the Children’s National Emergency Department and an associate professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at The George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences (GW).  Dr. Patel received her undergraduate degree in biophysics with a minor in psychology from Johns Hopkins University. Upon graduation, she served as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer in Baltimore at the Greater Homewood Community Corporation with a focus on asthma education. She has a medical degree from Penn State College of Medicine and a master’s degree in public health from the Milken Institute of Public Health at GW. She completed a pediatric residency, chief residency and pediatric emergency medicine fellowship at Children’s National before joining the faculty in 2012.

Dr. Patel is board-certified in pediatrics and pediatric emergency medicine. She is a physician scientist, and her research focuses on the reduction of asthma health disparities, firearm violence prevention and suicide prevention.

Raina Paul, MD

CHOC Children’s Hospital of Orange County

Dr. Raina Paul has dedicated her career to Quality Improvement research, having received QI training through the Intermountain Health Advanced Training Program in Utah and the Advanced Improvement Methods program at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. She began her career, completing residency and fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital. She is currently a Pediatric Emergency Medicine Attending at Children’s Hospital of Orange County in California and has been the Director of QI for the Advocate Aurora Pediatric ED system and the Assistant Medical Director of QI at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s hospital of Chicago.  She began her career conducting a successful ED sepsis improvement project at Boston Children’s Hospital and went on to become the data lead for the 25 hospital AAP Pediatric Septic Shock national QI Collaborative. She currently serves as the co-chair for the national 64 hospital, Improving Pediatric Sepsis outcomes collaborative, with over 200,000 patients, where data-driven implementation of interventions has resulted in a 35.7% mortality reduction. Her QI expertise has influenced the international ACCM Septic Shock and the Pediatric Surviving Sepsis Guidelines, which she co-authored and she has published over 30 peer reviewed articles detailing these QI efforts. Dr Paul has also served a reviewer for Pediatrics and Pediatric Quality and Safety.

Dr. Paul has led efforts on various AAP national committees as the immediate past Chair of the Committee on Quality Transformation (COQT) and on the executive committee for the Council on Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (COQUIPS). She has identified gaps in QI education, creating a national comprehensive QI curriculum and serves as the AAP lead for the National Pediatric Readiness Project, standardizing care for pediatric patients entering through general emergency departments. Her QI curriculum focuses on publication of QI research as this is a clear national gap without our health systems.

Catherina Pinnaro, MD, MS

University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine

Dr. Pinnaro is an Assistant Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes at the University of Iowa. Her long-term career goal is to isolate genetic and epigenetic contributions to diabetes risk, primarily in the context of complex genetic disorders like Turner syndrome, where the propensity to develop diabetes is poorly understood. Her current work delves into the influence of X chromosome parent-of-origin on glycemia in Turner syndrome. Her lab recently found that maternal X chromosome monosomy predicts higher blood glucoses in response to oral glucose in individuals with Turner syndrome. This highlights a potential role of imprinted X chromosome genes in regulating glucose metabolism. Dr. Pinnaro’s lab is employing novel methodologies including long-read nanopore sequencing to resolve allele-specific methylation in conjunction with deep glycemic phenotyping to better understand diabetes risk in Turner syndrome. Additionally, through her involvement in the multi-site registry, Inspiring New Science in Turner Syndrome (InsighTS), she participates in research aimed at improving clinical outcomes for individuals with Turner syndrome.  In addition to her research on Turner syndrome, Dr. Pinnaro is deeply engaged in research aimed to improve care for pediatric patients with diabetes. She is particularly interested in the evolving role of diabetes technology, including the evaluation of diabetes device usage among youth and the impact of retrospective glucose data review on glycemic control.

Andrew Prout, MD, MPH

Children’s Hospital of Michigan, Central Michigan University College of Medicine

Dr. Prout is a clinical and translational researcher. His primary research interest is to advance understanding of and develop targeted interventions for pathogenic changes in the microbiome and consequent maladaptive immune phenotypes in children with critical illness. He is currently the PI for a single-center prospective cohort trial funded by the Pediatric Critical Care and Trauma Scientist Development Program describing the role of depletion of commensal intestinal anaerobes in immune paralysis and adverse outcomes in infants after cardiopulmonary bypass. He plans to transition to leading a multicenter prospective cohort, followed by interventional trials of targeted therapuetic microbiome modulation based on immune phenotype in critically ill children.

He is an active member of the Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network, and a site co-investigator at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan. He is actively involved in subject enrollment, trial administration, and conduct of the phase II/III Personalized Immunomodulation in Pediatric Sepsis-Induced MODS (PRECISE) trial at CHM. He is also an active member of the Pediatric Acute Lung Injury and Sepsis Investigators, and is the site PI for several unfunded multicenter cohort trials through that organization. He is an active member of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, and has been an abstract reviewer, session moderator, and recent invited faculty presenter at the annual Congress.

Dr. Prout initially researched differential outcomes of sepsis in children with chronic disease (describing increased risk of mortality, increased risk of recurrent hospitalization, and differential organisms in children with significant chronic disease), which subsequently led to his current interest in one potential explanatory mechanism for these differential outcomes–persistent alterations in the microbiome causing immune dysregulation in these children.

Kimberly Quayle, MD

Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine

As a Pediatric Emergency Medicine physician, Dr. Quayle’s career has been dedicated to the clinical care of children with medical and trauma emergencies. Through her research collaboration with multicenter projects for the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN), she has contributed to the network’s efforts to improve clinical care for children and adolescents with acute illnesses and injuries. She has served as the Hospital Emergency Department Affiliate PI at Washington University School of Medicine for the HOMERUN node of the PECARN network from 2018 to 2021 overseeing the ongoing PECARN studies, and as division chief since 2017, she has led the research mission for pediatric emergency medicine.  Dr. Quayle has also participated as site PI for the following PECARN studies: head injury, intra-abdominal injury, fluid therapy for DKA, ESETT (antiepileptics for status epilepticus), serious bacterial infections in young febrile infants, and headache. Publications from these studies have established clinical criteria used to identify children at low risk for intracranial injury following blunt head trauma, clinical criteria to identify children at low risk for intra-abdominal injury following blunt trauma, affirmation of safety and efficacy  of fluid treatment regimens for children with diabetic ketoacidosis, determination of safety and efficacy of anti-epileptics for children with status epilepticus, and contribution to the literature on the evaluation of young febrile infants.

Francis Real, MD, MEd

University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

Dr. Real’s prior experiences reflect a strong dedication to pursuing a career as a clinician-investigator. As a general pediatrician at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC), he delivers primary care to children and adolescents. Dr. Real is the Co-Lead for Digital Simulation at the CCHMC Center for Simulation and Research, with a research focus aimed at using innovative technology to support clinicians’ communication skills with patients and families on evidence-based prevention. He obtained his medical degree at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and completed his pediatric residency at CCHMC. From 2015-2017, Dr. Real completed a HRSA-funded fellowship in educational research, culminating in a Master of Education degree from the University of Cincinnati. In 2015, he spearheaded a collaborative initiative of clinicians, educators, and technologists to develop a virtual reality (VR) intervention aiming to enhance clinician skills in addressing influenza vaccine hesitancy. The VR intervention yielded significant improvements in vaccination rates, providing crucial preliminary data to support an expanded research program leveraging VR applications for clinician training.  Since that time, Dr. Real has built a national reputation as a leading expert in digital simulation using VR. As an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and CCHMC, he has led educational interventions using VR to train clinicians in evidence-based communication related to uptake of effective prevention strategies. These efforts have spanned vaccination (1) (e.g., influenza [2, 3], HPV [4-7], COVID-19 [8]), behavioral health anticipatory guidance (9-12), and hydroxyurea for patients with sickle cell anemia (13) among other content areas (14-16). In 2019, he was awarded an R21 from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) related to using VR to support HPV vaccine communication. The work resulted in an 18% increase in HPV vaccination rates among participating clinicians (7). Other sources of funding for my research program have included CCHMC, the Academic Pediatric Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Patient Centered Outcome Research Institute. Most recently, Dr. Real has put his efforts toward training to support firearm safety counseling in clinical practice. This worked was featured in a podcast sponsored by the New England Journal of Medicine. He is a prior recipient of a NIH Loan Repayment Award. Dr. Real currently has 51 peer-reviewed publications and has presented his research at national meetings.

Dr. Real’s long-term goal is to decrease pediatric morbidity and mortality by disseminating effective training programs that support evidence-based practices.

Katherine Remick, MD

University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School, Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas

Dr. Kate Remick is a triple-board-certified Pediatrician, Pediatric Emergency Medicine physician, and EMS physician.  She is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Surgery/Perioperative Medicine at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. She serves as Associate Chair for Quality, Innovation and Outreach in the Department of Pediatrics, Co-Director of the National EMS for Children Innovation and Improvement Center, Co-Director of the National Pediatric Readiness Project, Executive Director of the National Pediatric Readiness Quality Initiative, and Medical Director for San Marcos/Hays County EMS System.

Using quality improvement science as an underpinning of her work, Dr. Remick focuses on health systems research and implementation science to enhance  emergency care outcomes for children. Dr. Remick has led numerous large-scale national quality improvement collaboratives that have engaged hundreds of frontline healthcare providers, hospitals, and EMS agencies across the United States and abroad. Her work transects policy development, survey design, measures development, advocacy, health system transformation, and the creation of data visualization platforms and registries to ensure system-level readiness. Her work spans the emergency care continuum encompassing behavioral/mental health emergencies, critical medical illness, injury, and disaster preparedness and response.  She has dedicated her life’s work to ensuring emergency care systems are optimized to meet the needs of children.

Nora Renthal, MD, PhD

Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School

The Renthal Research Group is dedicated to improving the quality of life for children affected by musculoskeletal diseases. Combining basic and clinical research in skeletal biology, we focus on understanding skeletal conditions and developing innovative treatment approaches for young patients.  Our goal is to integrate basic and clinical research to advance the care of children with musculoskeletal diseases. In our basic science work, we use genome-wide CRISPR screening techniques in cell culture growth plate models, linking these findings with genetic studies on human height and bone density. By studying both mouse and human chondrocytes, we aim to understand the genetic dynamics of the chondrocyte life cycle.  Clinically, we are involved in disability health equity work to address ableism faced by children with musculoskeletal diseases. Recognizing that discrimination can be a significant obstacle for our patients, we explore the lived experiences of individuals with musculoskeletal disabilities, particularly around equitable access to sexual and reproductive healthcare. Our aim is to improve clinical care by identifying and testing interventions, with a goal of ensuring that all patients receive equitable and respectful treatment, regardless of ability status.  By combining these research areas, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of skeletal conditions, more effective treatments, and patient care characterized by equity and inclusion.

Janine Rethy, MD, MPH

Georgetown University School of Medicine

Janine Rethy, MD, MPH, FAAP, IBCLC, is the Division Chief of Community Pediatrics at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Georgetown University School of Medicine. She received her BA in Biochemistry Cum Laude and with Distinction from Cornell University, and her MD and MPH from Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She completed residencies in Pediatrics and General Preventive Medicine at the Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC. In her current position at MedStar Georgetown, Dr. Rethy serves as Medical Director of both the Kids Mobile Medical Clinic and the Wellbeing clinical programs, Director of Medical Education for Community Pediatrics and Program Director for the Community Pediatrics and Child Advocacy Fellowship. Dr. Rethy leads an interprofessional Health Services Research team with a focus on community health systems innovation and health equity. Current research includes 1. Social and structural determinants with health with special focus on food insecurity and financial health 2. Infant and maternal health models with special focus on birth to three population 3. Dyadic mental health and early child development 4. Health systems transformation to build and evaluate innovative, effective and sustainable interprofessional models of care and decrease health disparities. 5. Health IT/Human Factors innovation. Currently, she is a Co-Investigator and Clinical Lead for the MedStar Health DC Safe Babies Safe Moms, a five-year collaborative health systems transformation and research initiative with the goal of delivering integrated, multigenerational care in order to decrease inequities for mothers and young children in the District of Columbia. She is PI on a DC Health Healthy Steps grant that include research components, and was recently awarded a multi-year research innovation award from the Marriott Foundation focusing on sustainable models of care that incorporate SDOH screening and response, initially focusing on Food as Medicine and a building a medical financial partnership.  She serves on multiple hospital and university committees, and for the DC AAP serves on the Executive Committee as well as CATCH Co-Facilitator; for national AAP she serves as a COACH for the Section on Childhood Obesity.

Steven Rhodes, MD, PhD

Indiana University School of Medicine

Dr. Rhodes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology/Stem Cell Transplant at Indiana University School of Medicine. His  laboratory focuses on understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms that govern the progression of plexiform and atypical neurofibroma precursor tumors to a deadly form of sarcoma called malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor (MPNST), the leading cause of death in persons with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1). The Rhodes lab uses a systems biology approach, leveraging patient samples and genetically engineered mouse models  to study how tumorigenic Schwann cells interact with the immune system to govern the progression of benign and pre-malignant neurofibromas to MPNST.  The goals of this work are to (1) identify new molecular diagnostic tools that allow for early detection of MPNST as well as tumors at increased risk for undergoing malignant transformation, and (2) evaluate novel immunotherapy approaches to delay or even prevent MPNST development in preclinical disease models, thereby accelerating the advancement of innovative clinical trials and informing paradigms for risk adapted care to improve outcomes for patients affected by these devastating tumors.

Additionally, Dr. Rhodes serves as the Site Principal Investigator for Indiana University within the Department of Defense sponsored Neurofibromatosis Clinical Trial Consortium (NFCTC) and is actively involved in multiple NF1 and NF2 focused clinical trials. As a pediatric oncologist, his clinical practice is devoted to caring for children with NF1, NF2, and Schwannomatosis as Co-Director of the Neurofibromatosis Multidisciplinary Program at the Indiana University Simon Cancer Center, providing comprehensive multi-subspecialty care, access to the latest clinical trials and personalized treatment strategies guided by cancer genomics and bench-to-bedside translational studies in the laboratory.

Sarah Ronis, MD, MPH, PhD

Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital

Sarah Ronis MD PhD an academic pediatrician and health services researcher devoted to improving systems of care for low-income families and their children.  Her work integrates frameworks derived from the fields of public health and clinical translational science, emphasizing the contributions of qualitative and mixed methods approaches to incorporate the perspectives of multiple stakeholders in such research efforts. In particular, she seeks to understand the multi-level influences on health trajectories, attending to how the interplay among health care systems features and family contexts determine the ways families from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds with lower income communicate with their clinicians, and the extent to which they may partner with their clinical teams.

Since 2019 she has served as the Director of the UH Rainbow Center for Child Health & Policy (CCHP), which brings together skilled professionals with expertise in population health, public health, quality improvement and implementation science to facilitate multidisciplinary, collaborative research in partnership with families and community members.  She serves as evaluation lead, co-investigator, PI and/or CoPI on diverse studies set in ambulatory and community settings.  She earned her Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College, Master of Public Health from the University of Rochester, and her Medical Doctorate and PhD in Clinical Translational Science from Case Western Reserve University.

Margaret Rush, MD, MSHS

Children’s National Health System, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences

Dr. Margaret Rush is a pediatric hospitalist with a special interest in caring for children with medical complexity.  Her clinical practice and research interests focus on helping families of children with medical complexity transition home from the hospital after admission.  She has a particular interest in the transition from the hospital to home for children who are technology dependent. Dr. Rush has noticed that the care our medical system provides these children and families can be fragmented, difficult for families to navigate and is highly variable and is working to improve the system and promote more standardized care specifically around the hospital to home transition.  Dr. Rush has served in leadership roles at Children’s National Hospital where she has worked to improve care and hospital systems using quality improvement and implementation science methodologies to promote hospital safety and quality of care.  Most recently she has worked on standardizing care and improving discharge transitions at a pediatric specialty care hospital often serving children who are newly technology dependent.

Dr. Rush’s past research has illustrated barriers to smooth care transitions including communication gaps between inpatient and outpatient providers and barriers encountered by families including securing home nursing support and completing caregiver training.

Dr. Rush hopes to continue to explore these opportunities for improvement, further understand the patient and family perspective and to work towards standardizing outcome metrics for hospital to home transitions for children with medical complexity so health systems and researchers can better understand the quality of transitions.

Jeffrey Russ, MD, PhD

Duke University School of Medicine

Dr. Jeffrey Russ is a fetal/neonatal neurologist and developmental neuroscientist at Duke University. Clinically, Dr. Russ runs the Duke Fetal/Neonatal Neurology clinic, which treats neurogenetic disorders, congenital brain malformations, and perinatal brain injuries, among other conditions. He is also Director of the Duke Neurological Intensive Care Nursery (NICN), a multi-disciplinary collaborative that emphasizes up-to-date practices to optimize neurodevelopmental outcomes for children with perinatal neurological disorders.  From a research perspective, Dr. Russ’s basic science laboratory utilizes molecular and developmental neuroscience techniques, including cutting edge single-nucleus transcriptomics, cell and organoid culture, and mouse models to understand how neurogenetic disorders and hypoxic-ischemic perinatal brain injury impact cortex development. The Russ lab aims to move beyond macroanatomic depictions of neurodevelopmental disorders and begin to understand them at the level of aberrant cortical microcircuits. Moreover, the lab utilizes transcriptomics and other molecular profiling techniques to seek novel therapeutic targets that could eventually improve outcomes for children with these disorders.  Before beginning his junior faculty career at Duke University, Dr. Russ received a BA in Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania. He then received an MD-PhD from the Weill Cornell/Sloan Kettering/Rockefeller University Tri-Institutional MD-PhD Program, where he completed his graduate thesis in spinal cord development with Dr. Julia Kaltschmidt. Dr. Russ then completed Child Neurology residency, with an emphasis on neonatal neurology, at the University of California San Francisco.

Ibrahim Sammour, MBBS

Indiana University School of Medicine

Ibrahim Sammour is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at Indiana University. He practices neonatal-perinatal medicine at Riley Hospital for Children. Clinically he is a member of the interdisciplinary bronchopulmonary dysplasia team, and has a vested interest in congenital heart disease and hemodynamics.  His research interests revolve around changing lung mechanics in infancy and bronchopulmonary dysplasia, simulation-based device testing and disease modeling, and use of 3D modeling and printing in medicine.

Timothy Savage, MD, MPH, MSc

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital

Timothy Savage, MD, MPH, MSc is an Associate Epidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a pediatric infectious diseases attending physician at Boston Children’s Hospital.  Dr. Savage received an undergraduate degree with honors from Brown University, Doctor of Medicine and Master of Science degrees from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is a graduate of the University of Washington Pediatric Residency Program at Seattle Children’s Hospital where he served an additional year as a Chief Resident. He completed a pediatric infectious diseases fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital where he was recognized with the Maxwell Finland Award for Research Excellence in Fellowship and was selected to the Boston Combined Residency Program Faculty Teaching Honor Roll.  Dr. Savage has two overarching themes to his research. First, to improve the rigor of retrospective studies using large databases, and second, to apply advanced methods to identify the optimal treatment strategies of common childhood infections. His methods-oriented work is supported by an NIH K08 award to emulate ten randomized clinical trials in children using insurance claims databases to determine which study design and analytic approaches lead to the best match for the RCT effect estimates, and in doing so identify the suite of methods that yield the most reliable results. His applied work has included studies to characterize antibiotic utilization for acute sinusitis and to compare the effectiveness of the two most frequently used antibiotics to treat acute sinusitis in children. His ongoing applied work includes studies to identify the optimal treatment duration of acute sinusitis in children and to characterize the risk of long-term outcomes following congenital cytomegalovirus and congenital syphilis infections. His research has been published in JAMA, JAMA Dermatology, Pediatrics, and Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety.

Sarah Schaffer DeRoo, MD

Children’s National Health System, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences

Dr. Sarah Schaffer DeRoo is a General Pediatrician at Children’s National Hospital and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Dr. Schaffer DeRoo’s scholarly work focuses on immunization delivery and behavioral interventions for immunization promotion. Her most recent work has examined parental attitudes about COVID-19 testing and vaccination, seasonal respiratory immunization promotion, and communication strategies for addressing parental vaccine hesitancy. Dr. Schaffer DeRoo received her medical degree from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and completed her residency training in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She currently serves as an expert for the American Academy of Pediatrics Global Vaccine Hesitancy Simulation Project for which she has collaboratively developed and implemented a curriculum for training clinicians to address parental vaccine hesitancy. The long-term goal of Dr. Schaffer DeRoo’s research is to develop evidence-based behavioral interventions to promote pediatric immunization uptake.

Justin Searns, MD

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Children’s Hospital Colorado

Dr. Justin Searns is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in the sections of Pediatric Hospital Medicine and Pediatric Infectious Diseases.  He received dual undergraduate degrees in physiology and philosophy from the University of Washington in 2007 and went on to receive his medical degree from Oregon Health and Sciences University in 2012. He returned to Colorado for both his pediatric residency and his pediatric infectious diseases fellowship training which he completed in 2018.

Dr. Searns’ primary research interest focuses on improving the care of children hospitalized with acute musculoskeletal infections (MSKIs) through clinical pathway implementation and diagnostic innovation. His early work in this field described the clinical improvements following implementation of a clinical pathway for pediatric MSKIs. He recognized a need to improve our diagnostic approach to children with bone and joint infections and went on to validate a novel rapid diagnostic test for MSKIs. This work on MSKI diagnostics earned him the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society Antimicrobial Stewardship Fellowship Award in 2017. He published his findings in the Journal of Microbiological Methods and the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society. The rapid diagnostic test he validated was then implemented for routine testing at Children’s Hospital Colorado thanks to his efforts, making CHCO the first hospital in the country to offer this rapid diagnostic test on bone and joint specimens.

He went on to join the University of Colorado Department of Pediatrics faculty in the fall of 2018 and was quickly awarded a Children’s Colorado Research Scholar award in 2019 to further describe CHCO’s efforts improving care for children with MSKIs and to develop a case-finding algorithm for acute hematogenous MSKIs using billing data from the Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS) database. Using this newly validated and published MSKI case-finding algorithm, he began leading a multisite PHIS research group interested in improving care for children with MSKIs.

He was awarded the Pediatric Hospital Medicine Researcher of the Year in 2020 and completed the Surgical/Subspecialists Clinical Outcomes Research Fellowship on CU Anschutz Medical Campus in 2022. Dr. Searns has transitioned into his role as an extramurally funded independent researcher and has successfully competed for a K23 award through NIAID and a pilot grant through CCTSI/NCATS. He continues to build his expertise in pediatric MSKIs, novel diagnostic validation, clinical outcomes, and administrative database research and is pursuing a Masters of Science in Clinical Science.

Monica Serrano-Gonzalez, MD

Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Hasbro Children’s Hospital at Rhode Island Hospital

Dr. Serrano-Gonzalez is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, as well as a faculty affiliate of The Mindfulness Center at Brown University. She serves as co-director of Hasbro Children’s Hospital Insulin Resistance Clinic, where she cares for children with obesity and its complications on an ongoing basis.

Additionally, Dr. Serrano-Gonzalez is a funded Junior Investigator on the Hasbro Children’s Hospital IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network (ISPCTN) award, a part of the National Institute of Health (NIH) Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program. In this role, she is leading a pilot study of a mindful eating web-based app for adolescents with overweight. She is also a co-investigator for the Rhode Island site on the NIH ECHO Cohorts award, and an Early-Stage Investigator (ESI) on a funded multi-center National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) award, ENRICH (Early Intervention to Promote Cardiovascular Health of Mothers and Children).

Dr. Serrano-Gonzalez received a diversity supplement to one of her mentor’s R01 awards through the NHLBI to study how body weight and body composition moderate the relationship between sleep duration and immune balance in urban children with asthma, how sleep duration effects eating behavior, and how the home food environment moderates this relationship. She is an active member of the ISPCTN Obesity Working Group and co-chairs the ENRICH ESI committee. In collaboration with cardiology colleagues, she is also leading a study to assess the clinical outcomes of Hasbro Children’s Hospital Pediatric Lipid clinic since it switched to tele-health delivery and she is a member of the American Heart Association Young Hearts committee.

Dr. Serrano-Gonzalez is committed to advance the field of childhood obesity prevention and treatment, specifically identifying risk factors at the intersection of insulin resistance and cardiovascular risk, in an effort to decrease health disparities in the area of pediatric obesity.

Elizabeth Sewell, MD, MPH

Emory University School of Medicine, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta

Dr. Sewell’s clinical and research interest focuses on the prevention and management of brain injury in high-risk neonates. Since joining faculty at Emory University in 2016, Dr. Sewell has led educational opportunities, clinical guideline development, quality projects, and research initiatives focused on neonatal neurology.  She has created institutional guidelines on hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), therapeutic hypothermia, and neonatal seizures that have led to regional quality improvement and research initiatives, designed and co-led trainee curriculum through Neonatal Neuroradiology Conferences, and conducted and led high-quality research at a national level designed to improve care of infants with brain injury.  In 2022, Dr. Sewell founded and was named medical director for the NeuroNICU at Children’s Hospital of Atlanta, whose mission is to provide multi-disciplinary neurologically focused intensive care that will improve prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment of brain injury in neonates to positively impact neurodevelopmental outcomes and to apply evidence based neuroprotective and preventive practices.  In this initiative, she led collaborations with leaders in Pediatric Neurology, Pediatric Neuroradiology, and Pediatric Neurosurgery to improve care for infants in our system with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, seizures, post-hemorrhagic hydrocephalus, stroke, vein of galen malformation, other types of brain injury.

Dr. Sewell also works at delivery hospitals to improve care for infants with brain injury and was Co-Principal Investigator (PI) for an institutional grant called the Baby Brain Bundle aimed to decrease brain injury in preterm infants through various quality initiatives in collaboration with a community partner and Lived Experience Advisory Group.  Her clinical research has been concentrated on infants with seizures, HIE, post-hemorrhagic hydrocephalus (PHH), and neurodevelopmental outcomes. Since joining the Neonatal Research Network (NRN) at Emory University in 2020, Dr. Sewell has led two-NRN studies with the mentorship of Dr. Ravi Patel, both related to infants with HIE.  These studies were presented to international audiences at Pediatric Academic Societies 2021 and Newborn Brain Societies in 2023.  From 2020-2021, she was PI for studies involving follow up and neurodevelopmental outcomes at Emory University.  Furthermore, she is the site PI for Emory University for the Cool Prime study aimed to evaluate the effect of therapeutic hypothermia in infants with mild HIE.

In addition, Dr. Sewell serves on the Neurosurgery and Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy Interest Groups for the Children’s Hospital Neonatal Consortium (CHNC).  She led a multi-center study evaluating interventions and outcomes in infants with PHH.  She became co-leader of the Neurosurgery group in 2023 and supports and supervises other member projects through this position.  Additionally, Dr. Sewell has leveraged local data from the CHNC to support neonatal nurse practitioner and pediatric resident research on PHH.  The residents honored her with Mentor of the Year in 2024 for her ongoing support and mentorship.  Dr. Sewell became a member of the Southern Society for Pediatric Research in 2023.  She plans to continue being actively involved in individual research, multi-center collaborations, and mentorship surrounding research on newborn brain injury in the years to come.

Reshma Shah, MD, MPH

University of Illinois College of Medicine

Dr. Shah is a physician-scientist, an Associate Professor of Pediatrics, and a practicing Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrician at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Dr. Shah’s research aims to improve educational and developmental disparities with a health equity focus. Dr. Shah received her MD from Wayne State College of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. She trained with Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital and Lurie Children’s/Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine pediatric residency programs and Developmental and Behavioral fellowship program at University of Chicago. She currently heads a clinical research lab which incorporates behavioral intervention design and implementation science to develop, implement, and evaluate community-clinical linkage models to increase equitable access to educational and therapeutic services that promote developmental skills and contribute to improved health outcomes for both children and their families. A primary objective of her lab is to also create accessible and sustainable strategies supporting early childhood development (ECD) in healthcare settings serving predominantly low-income communities, both domestically and internationally.

Megha Sharma, MD, MS

University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences College of Medicine, Arkansas Children’s Hospital

Patrícia Silveira, MD, PhD

McGill University Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences

Patrícia Pelufo Silveira, Ph.D. (she/her), is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University and the scientific director of the Genomics and Epigenetics Pillar of the Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics & Mental Health, based at the Douglas Research Centre. With a multidisciplinary training in General Pediatrics, Neonatal Follow-up, Developmental Biology, and Neuroscience, Dr. Silveira’s research focuses on identifying how gene networks interact with environmental adversities early in life, modifying endophenotypes (impulsivity, sensitivity to reward, executive function, food choices) that ultimately affect healthy growth and neurodevelopment, increasing an individual’s risk for developing chronic metabolic diseases and psychopathologies across their lifespan. She has published more than 180 journal articles, including publications in high-impact journals such as Biological Psychiatry, Molecular Psychiatry, Neuroscience Biobehavioral Reviews and JAMA Pediatrics. Her work has been cited over 2789 times and she has delivered lectures at important international conferences (e.g., American College of Neuropsychopharmacology Meeting, Society for Neuroscience Meeting, Canadian Pediatric Society Conference, among others) and at several universities around the world. In 2022, she was elected as a Member of the College of New Scholars of the Royal Society of Canada. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University.

Gautam Singh, MBBS, MD

Children’s Hospital of Michigan

Dr. Singh is a pediatric cardiologist and a clinical investigator with expertise and experience over 20 years in clinical and translational research that focus on cardiac phenotyping and mechanistic understanding of cardiovascular, cardiopulmonary, and congenital heart diseases to help develop therapeutic intervention. Dr. Singh and his research group have studied the effects of maturational changes, hemodynamic loading and altered physiologic condition on cardiac mechanics, structure and function in these and other disease syndromes. He is nationally recognized as a non-invasive cardiac imaging expert who has contributed to the understanding of cardiac mechanics through the innovative use of cardiac modalities. Dr. Singh has functioned as a project leader and has worked closely with collaborators from newborn medicine, genetics, basic science, physics, and cardiac radiology. He formed a highly productive, multidisciplinary research collaborative team with colleagues in Physics and Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis that has been non-invasively defining myoarchitecture and myocardial tissue characters in normal and disease condition. Together with Dr. Kathy Grange, Professor of Pediatric and Genetics at Washington University, he was the first to propose that Cantu syndrome, a rare complex multi-organ disease, was due to mutations in the KATP channel genes ABCC9 and KCNJ8, which was confirmed with subsequent genetic analysis. Leveraging the Prematurity and Respiratory Outcomes Program (PROP) at Washington University, his team and he developed and validated quantitative echocardiographic measures of RV function and pulmonary hemodynamics in preterm-born infants that discerned that a primary vascular mechanism independent of lung disease per se may cause pulmonary hypertension. In another study in the same cohort, found that preterm infants with higher consumption of mother’s own milk was associated with enhanced cardiac performance at age 1 year, suggesting that mother’s own consumption may play a dynamic modulator role on cardiac mechanics in preterm-born infants and help in normalization of the preterm cardiac phenotype. The study in Multisystem Inflammatory Diseases in children associated with COVID-19, by his team and him at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, demonstrated the persistence of subclinical myocardial dysfunction up to post-acute 6 months period. The team just completed a long-term follow-up study on this cohort and submitted in a scientific cardiology journal for consideration for publication.

Fotios Spyropoulos, MD

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Spyropoulos is an Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an attending Neonatologist in the Department of Pediatrics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He earned his MD from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Medical School in Greece, completed his Pediatric residency at the University of Iowa, and pursued his Neonatology fellowship training in the Harvard Combined Neonatal/Perinatal program. His research, focuses on unraveling the link between prematurity and adult heart failure, aiming to identify new therapies for the prevention and treatment of this disease. Currently, he is investigating the role of oxidative stress in regulating cardiac function and metabolism, specifically how in utero exposure to oxidative stress influences cardiomyocyte maturation and impacts long-term cardiovascular health. Additionally, he is exploring the potential use of targeted antioxidant therapies to prevent the development of cardiac dysfunction.

Christine Stoops, DO, MPH

University of Alabama at Birmingham, Heersink School of Medicine, Children’s of Alabama

Christine Stoops, DO, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Department of Perinatal-Neonatal Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and The Children’s Hospital of Alabama. Her undergraduate career began at Birmingham-Southern College followed by a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology from UAB and completion of medical school at the University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC). She completed her pediatric residency and perinatal-neonatal fellowship both at UAB/COA and obtained a Certificate in Healthcare Quality also at UAB. Her interest in neonatal renal physiology and acute kidney injury began during residency, but further developed under the mentorship of Dr. David Askenazi (Pediatric Nephrologist at UAB/COA) culminating in numerous publications and development of the national Baby NINJA collaborate, a quality improvement driven program aimed at reducing and/or eliminating nephrotoxic medication exposure and subsequent acute kidney injury in the neonatal ICU population. She is also the medical director of the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at UAB Medical West in Birmingham, AL.

Dr. Stoops’s interest in research began in the Brain SPORE at UAB for which she was awarded The Cancer Research Experiences (CARES) for Students Award for Excellence in Cancer Prevention and Control Research from the Comprehensive Cancer Center at UAB during graduate school. She expanded her research experience beyond basic science in the field of epidemiology working as an assistant epidemiologist at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center working on familial inheritance of Li-Fraumeni Syndrome in the department of cancer genetics prior to medical school.

Her current research interest is in neonatal renal physiology in addition to epidemiology and quality improvement of neonatal AKI and its long-term sequelae. This began with investigating the relationship between AKI and intraventricular hemorrhage in neonates both in a single-center and multi-center ancillary study using from the Assessment of Worldwide Acute Kidney injury Epidemiology in Neonates (AWAKEN) trial. Dr. Stoops then began work on the single-center quality improvement program to reduce nephrotoxic exposure and subsequent AKI in the NICU with findings published in the Journal of Pediatrics. Dr. Stoops won multiple regional and national awards including Best Abstract Award at the 2018 AKI & CRRT conference and 2018 UAB Pediatric Science Day. She also received the UAB 2018-2019 Pediatric Subspecialty Research Achievement Award prior to fellowship graduation. Upon graduating from fellowship and accepting a position at Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at UAB/COA, she was awarded a Pilot and Feasibility grant through the Pediatric Center of Excellence in Nephrology NIH P50 DK096418 to initiate and validate Baby NINJA at other NICUs in the country, thereby creating a multi-center collaborative whose aim is the reduce the burden of NTM-AKI in the NICU in addition to evaluating the role of urinary biomarkers as an alternative to obtaining daily blood draws. This work was published in Neonatology, along with follow up work investigating long-term risk of chronic kidney disease in this population. She is currently in the process of evaluating the data from her multi-center QI Baby NINJA Collaborative. Lastly, because of her interest in quality improvement, she has also published on safe sleep practice quality improvement initiatives at COA.

Shazeen Suleman, MD, MPH, MSc

Stanford University School of Medicine

Dr. Shazeen Suleman (she/her) is a Clinical Associate Professor in General Pediatrics at Stanford University. She is the Co-Director of Community Engagement with the Office of Child Health Equity and a Global Health Faculty Fellow. She holds a courtesy appointment with the University of Toronto Temerty Faculty of Medicine and is an Affiliate Scientist with the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions.  Prior to joining Stanford, she developed the Compass Clinic, a trauma-informed, multi-disciplinary clinic that cares for newcomer children with special healthcare needs, the only one of its kind in Ontario, Canada. Her research (www.thecompasslab.org) uses community-based participatory research methods (CBPR) to address health disparities for migrant children with special healthcare needs through co-developing and evaluating interventions and policies. She holds multiple grants from the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR), including a prestigious New Investigator Grant. Her work is fundamentally guided the communities she serves. She has a long history of community engagement and organizing, beginning from when she co-founded the MusicBox Children’s Charity (www.musicboxcc.com), a now national organization that has provided free music education programming to support whole child development to nearly 20,000 marginalized children across Canada, with over 30 community partners.  She is recognized as a national expert in Canada for caring for migrant children and holds multiple leadership roles, including the chair of the AAP Chapter 1 Immigrant Child Health Committee, the Newcomer Child Health Special Interest Group and the Caring for Kids New to Canada Taskforce with the Canadian Pediatric Society. Her longstanding relationships with refugee support agencies in Canada and the United States, including shelters, settlement agencies, governmental institutions, local and federal policymakers and clinical and community advocates locally and across both countries help her contribute to advocacy efforts to improve the lives of migrant children in North America.

Michael Tchou, MD, MSc

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Children’s Hospital Colorado

Mike Tchou MD, MSc is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado and the Director of Quality in the Section of Hospital Medicine at the Children’s Hospital Colorado.  He completed a Pediatric Hospital Medicine fellowship at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and a Master of Science in Clinical and Translational Research degree at the University of Cincinnati.  He has also completed training in improvement science as a Quality Scholar through the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence and research fellowships at the Adult and Child Consortium for Health Outcomes and Research and Delivery Science and the PEDSnet Learning Health Systems Scholar Program.  Dr. Tchou has an interest in studying the topic of high-value care, i.e. the ways we can improve the quality of healthcare while maintaining or reducing overall health systems costs.  His current research is focused on understanding the overuse of medical resources related to diagnostic testing and identifying best practices and conceptual frameworks for value improvement projects. He serves as Digital Media Director and Executive Council member for the Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings (PRIS) Network.

Melissa Thoene, MS, PhD, RD, LMNT

University of Nebraska College of Medicine

Melissa Thoene, PhD, RD is a registered dietitian and has worked in the neonatal intensive care unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center for nearly 13 years.  She completed her dietetic internship at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, followed by a Master of Science degree in Medical Nutrition and lastly, her doctorate in Pediatrics.  In addition to clinical care, she participates in perinatal nutrition research, with particular interest in neonatal nutrition & growth and enhancing clinical care practices.  She studies the status of nutritional antioxidants in mother-infant dyads and breast milk to evaluate the effect on infant health outcomes.  Dr. Thoene has special interest in infants born extremely preterm or extremely low birth weight, so seeks to enhance the clinical outcomes of this population by identifying optimal nutrition support practices that are feasible and effective.

Michael Toce, MD, MS

Boston Children’s Hospital

Dr. Toce is a board-certified pediatric emergency medicine physician and medical toxicologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on pediatric poisonings with a concentration on the impact of various state policies on adolescent and young adult drug overdoses. Dr. Toce seeks to combine his training in pediatric emergency medicine and medical toxicology to provide comprehensive care to acutely poisoned patients while performing pediatric-based research to inform state and federal policy makers who often overlook pediatric populations.

Dr. Toce began his research career publishing novel case reports, case series, and reviews. Seeking to expand his research skills and explore larger databases, Dr. Toce embarked on a series of studies that focused on the association of a variety of opioid-reduction policies with pediatric opioid and benzodiazepine poisonings. He examined the association of prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs), pain clinic legislation, and opioid prescribing guidelines on pediatric opioid poisonings reported to the National Poison Data System (JAMA Pediatrics 2020). This work was presented as a platform at PAS 2019 Baltimore and he was awarded the APA Trainee Research Award. Utilizing a large, national commercial insurance database, he explored the association of PDMPs with adolescent and young adult opioid prescribing and overdose. This was accepted for platform presentation at PAS 2020 prior to its cancellation and he was again awarded the APA Trainee Research Award. Additionally, he received the Medical Toxicology Foundation Innovative Research and Teaching Award to support this work (Annals of Emergency Medicine 2023). In 2020 Dr. Toce was awarded the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology Research Award for his project examining the impact of PDMPs on adolescent and young adult benzodiazepine prescribing and overdose (Clinical Toxicology 2023).

Recognizing the blossoming mental health crisis, Dr. Toce performed a study examining pre-teen and adolescent anti-epileptic drug overdoses (AEDs). AEDs are increasing being used for the treatment of psychiatric conditions, exposing many children to potentially harmful medications, including adolescents at high-risk for self-harm (Clinical Toxicology 2022). Finally, Dr. Toce collaborated with researchers and clinicians from the Children’s Hospital of Michigan and examined pediatric poisonings before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (Pediatrics 2021). Continued collaboration with this group led to a sentinel MMWR publication on pediatric melatonin poisonings (MMWR 2022) as well as a study examining pediatric hand sanitizer poisonings (Clinical Toxicology 2023). Lastly, Dr. Toce examined the use of diagnostic testing in pediatric cannabis poisonings and found that despite the increasing frequency of these exposures, invasive testing and procedures is common (American Journal of Emergency Medicine 2023).

Mireya Paulina Velasquez, MD

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Paulina Velasquez, MD, is an Associate Member in the Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cell Therapy (BMTCT). She received her MD from Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala and then went on to train in Pediatrics and Pediatric Hematology Oncology at Baylor College of Medicine. She joined St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in 2017. As a physician scientist, she is focused on preclinical development of immunotherapeutic strategies for high-risk hematological malignancies. She is currently spearheading BMTCT’s preclinical efforts in Cellular Immunotherapy for Leukemias, focusing on antigen discovery and multiantigen targeting, as well as improvement of T-cell function. She is also co-principal investigator for several Phase I CAR T cell therapy clinical trials for patients with relapsed/refractory AML.

Matthew Vogt, MD, PhD

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine

Matthew R. Vogt, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor in Pediatrics (Division of Infectious Diseases) and Microbiology & Immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. Dr. Vogt obtained his degrees at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. His thesis work in the laboratory of Michael S. Diamond, MD, PhD focused on the study of antibody modification of West Nile virus infection. He completed a residency in Pediatrics at the Boston Combined Residency Program of Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center. Dr. Vogt then moved to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for his fellowship in Pediatric Infectious Diseases. With the support of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society-St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Fellowship Program in Basic Research he joined the laboratory of James E. Crowe, Jr., MD. In the Crowe laboratory, Dr. Vogt isolated human monoclonal antibodies from subjects infected with enterovirus D68, a virus that typically causes respiratory illness but also causes increasingly large outbreaks of acute flaccid myelitis, a polio-like paralyzing illness.

In 2020 Dr. Vogt joined the faculty at UNC. He sees patients as a consultant on the Pediatric Infectious Diseases service at N.C. Children’s Hospital, runs a basic science laboratory, and oversees a clinical research team. The Vogt laboratory is focused on understand why common pediatric respiratory virus infections cause severe disease in some people. Currently they focus on picornaviruses, studying both the pathogen and the host immune response. Some specific viruses studied include enterovirus D68, the main cause of outbreaks of acute flaccid myelitis (polio-like paralysis); parechoviruses, which cause neonatal encephalitis; and rhinovirus C, which causes especially severe respiratory infections in very young children and people with asthma as compared to other rhinoviruses. Projects focus on studying mechanisms of viral pathogenesis in both human respiratory epithelial cultures and small animal models such as mice. Human antibody effects on pathogenesis are also of particular interest, as are isolating new human monoclonal antibodies that cross-react between different enteroviruses and parechoviruses.

Kate Wallis, MD, MPH

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Kate Wallis, MD, MPH, FAAP is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician (DBP) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Wallis completed her combined MD/MPH degrees at Stony Brook University School of Medicine. She completed pediatrics residency at NYU School of Medicine/Bellevue Hospital and fellowship in Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at CHOP. She has received additional training in research through participation in the Academic Pediatrics Association’s Research Scholars Program, the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities’ Health Disparities Research Institute, Penn’s Implementation Science Institute, and Penn’s Qualitative Institute. She received an APA Young Investigator Award. She serves as a lead on the Developmental and Behavioral Pediatric Research Network (DBPNet) Health Equity Node, is co-chair of the research committee in the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics (SDBP), and serves on the AAP Committee on Pediatric Research.

Dr. Wallis is a health equity researcher whose portfolio focuses on addressing disparities in care for children and youth with developmental disabilities and autism. Her primary line of research aims to understand the cause of disparities in the identification of autism in patients from minoritized backgrounds, especially through the process of screening and referral within primary care settings. She has conducted multi-methods studies, including a study examining perspectives on telehealth evaluations for autism in young children. She has conducted and contributed to multiple studies of family’s preferred language as a factor affecting healthcare delivery and outcomes. Additionally, she has investigated the process of screening for and identifying depression and suicidality among autistic adolescents in primary care settings.

She has extensive experience teaching trainees about research. She serves as Assistant Fellowship Program Director for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at CHOP, where she leads fellows’ research. She will serve as faculty for the 4th year for the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics Research Scholars Symposium. She has taught workshops at the PAS and SDBP meeting on getting started in research. She previously taught Capstone I and Advanced Epidemiology within Penn’s MPH program. She has served as primary research mentor for >10 trainees within medicine and public health training programs.

Russell Whelan, MD, PhD

Children’s Hospital Colorado, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Dr. Whelan is a Physician-Scientist in Pediatric Nephrology, with a long track record of research experience. His initial research during his undergraduate and PhD studies focused mechanisms of cardiac injury, with a particular focus on the roles of Bax and Bak in mediating programmed apoptosis and necrosis. However, during his pediatric residency in Seattle, he became interested in Pediatric Nephrology, fascinated by both the clinical and research opportunities available.  Pursuing his fellowship training at Seattle Children’s Hospital, his fellowship research focused on better understanding Shiga toxin’s effects on the renal microvasculature, utilizing bioengineering techniques to demonstrate direct endothelial injury from Shiga toxin treatment in engineered microvessels under flow conditions, and also demonstrating important preclinical evidence that inhibition of Shiga toxin interaction with its obligate receptor in engineered renal microvessels can effectively prevent endothelial injury.  Continuing his work in mechanisms of microvascular injury in the kidney, he took a faculty position as the Children’s Hospital of Colorado/University of Colorado in order to pursue a more focused approach on the role of complement in mediating microvascular injury in glomerular endothelium.  Leveraging his prior animal, cellular, in-vitro, and bio-engineering research experiences, his current work focuses on the role of complement regulators in mediating injury at the endothelial surface – a critical nexus of interaction between the vascular, blood, and immune systems.  Through this work, his goals are to provide a greater understanding of the underlying mechanisms of complement-mediated endothelial injury, as well as to explore and develop novel markers and therapeutic to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of complement-associated pathologies in the kidney and beyond.

Brian Williams, MD

University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, American Family Children’s Hospital

Dr. Williams is a pediatric and adult hospitalist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. His research career began during his Med-Peds residency at UC-San Diego after witnessing negative health consequences of smoke exposure in his pediatric patients. This led to qualitative work in which he was able to improve tobacco screening rates in the children’s hospital from 66% to >95%. This work ultimately led to parents being referred to the California smoker’s helpline.

After an institution change in 2018, he was able to obtain protected time within the UW-Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention where he has served as a principal and co-investigator on numerous tobacco control studies. HIs work largely focuses on youth e-cigarette cessation interventions and identifying and intervening with parents who smoke while their child is hospitalized. He is currently working on developing a brief online intervention for adolescents and young adults who vape while also running a clinical trial treating parents in the children’s hospital who smoke. In addition, he was recently awarded a K08 award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. This work focuses on identifying and testing mechanisms to increase engagement with e-cigarette cessation programs while also identifying and testing specific vaping cessation interventions.

Elizabeth Wolf, MD, MPH

Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine

Elizabeth Wolf, MD, MPH is a general pediatrician and health services researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). Dr. Wolf has a diverse portfolio of research including vaccine delivery, health care value and health disparities. Dr. Wolf has several first-author publications in high-impact journals including JAMA, JAMA Pediatrics, Pediatrics, and Annals of Family Medicine. Her most recent paper, “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality Among US Youth” was published in JAMA in May 2024. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and PBS.

Dr. Wolf was a National Center for Translational Sciences KL2 Scholar at VCU and given a R-03 award to understand the patterns and drivers of low-value care in children. She has won numerous research awards including the Academic Pediatric Association’s Young Investigator Award, the VCU Center for Clinical and Translational Research (CCTR) Endowment Award, and the VCU Child Health Research Institute Collaborative Award. Dr. Wolf works with the Virginia Ambulatory Care Outcomes Research Network (ACORN) and is part of a national collaboration that regularly reviews articles on low-value care in Pediatrics.

Dr. Wolf has held positions within the Academic Pediatric Association including Region IV Co-Chair and the Health Care Value Special Interest Group Co-Chair. She is a board member of the Virginia, Carolinas and Washington DC chapter of Reach Out and Read that promotes early literacy. She is an active member of the American Academy of Pediatrics and advocates for gun safety, improved insurance coverage, and other topics relevant to child health.

Davene Wright, PhD

Harvard Medical School, Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Population Medicine, a research and academic partnership between the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Harvard Medical School. There, I am the site PI for the Harvard-Wide Pediatric Health Services Research Fellowship Program. From 2012-2019, I was an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington and a Principal Investigator at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute. I am also the co-chair of the Decision Sciences for Child Health Collaborative, the Society for Medical Decision Making’s pediatric interest group.  I am a decision scientist, interested in the study of how decision makers (whether they be patients, providers, or health care payers) make decisions and how they can make better decisions in the presence of uncertainty, complexity, and competing values. The overarching goal of my research is to use decision sciences methods to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of health care for children with chronic diseases with a focus on obesity and diabetes. I specialize in conceptualizing of and leading interdisciplinary studies that link a range of decision sciences methods and related techniques including stated preference elicitation, economic evaluation, simulation modeling, health services research, and qualitative research. As an applied methodologist with deep roots in the child health research community, I have disseminated previously underutilized decision sciences methods in pediatrics through research, teaching, mentoring, and service.

Jun Yang, MBBS, MS, PhD

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Medicine

Dr. Jun Yang is an Associate Member in the Department of Surgery at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He obtained his medical degree (MBBS) in Qingdao Medical College, and Master in Medicine at The National Institute for Biological and Pharmaceutical Products in Beijing, where he cloned the genotype 4 of hepatitis E virus and a series of novel strains of TT virus. Jun Yang obtained his PhD at the Institute of Cancer Research in UK, where he studied the regulation of hypoxia-inducible factor 1. Jun Yang joined Dr. Adrian Harris’s laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University, where he studied hypoxia-mediated epigenetic regulation through histone demethylases. Jun Yang then joined St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, as a postdoctoral research fellow in Drs. Chuck Sherr and Andrew Davidoff laboratories, to continue studying the functions of histone demethylases in pediatric cancers and develop novel anticancer therapies, where he was promoted to be a faculty member in Department of Surgery. His main research interests focus on transcription, epigenetics and metabolism in oncogenesis by using cutting-edge technologies (i.e., scRNA-seq, spatiotranscriptomics, ChIP-seq/Cut&Tag, genome-wide CRISPR editing), generation of transgenic mouse models to understand the mechanism of tumor initiation and progression, design translational therapies using high-risk pediatric cancer models, and drug development by using medicinal chemistry and biophysical approaches.

Michelle Yang, MD, MSCI

University of Utah School of Medicine

Michelle Yang is an assistant professor of neonatology within the department of pediatrics at the University of Utah. Her overarching career goal is to advance public health by integrating physiology and pharmacology into approaches for designing and conducting early-phase trials in critically ill infants. To assist with this goal, she obtained a masters degree in clinical investigation and is currently pursuing a PhD in clinical pharmacology. Dr. Yang is actively involved in both the design and conduct of clinical trials within the division. She currently leads multiple investigator-led clinical trials, one of which is supported by the Thrasher Foundation.

Dr. Yang is also passionate on improving the care of critically ill infants, with a focus on infants with pulmonary hypoplasia such as congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH). Her academic and clinical career thus far reflects her efforts in improving the care of infants with CDH. She is the founder of and neonatology lead for the Intermountain Health’s Pulmonary Hypoplasia follow-up clinic. This clinic allows for screening and treatment of ongoing CDH related conditions; provides a population and venue for CDH research; and establishes a presence within the greater academic research CDH community. She is also active within the Utah Fetal Center and the Utah neonatal ECMO program.