Maida Chen, MD

Dr. Chen has devoted much of her academic career exploring the clinical manifestations, sequelae, and treatment of sleep disorders and sleep disordered breathing in children, particularly in clinical populations involving those with medical complexity. As Director of the Sleep Center at Seattle Children’s and University of Washington’s School of Medicine, she has had the ability to successfully participate in and lead collaborative research teams both within and external to her institution. Given her dedication to education and training, while many of the projects were her original design and hypotheses, the bulk of first authorship responsibilities were mostly with post-doctoral fellows or other medical trainees. The early phases of her research were specifically on those with Congenital Central Hypoventilation Syndrome (CCHS), a rare disorder of respiratory control. Work included one of the earliest reports of parent-child transmission, exploring alternative treatment modalities using phrenic nerve pacing, and alcohol use/abuse in this population. More recently this line of study has led to novel work on neurocognitive function in those with CCHS using the NIH Toolbox, leading to an important discovery of learning differences in this population.

She has since focused on the characterization and treatment of sleep disorders in a wide spectrum of children. She has participated in studies examining sleep in children with asthma and fetal alcohol exposure. She led a team in coordination with otolaryngology examining then-novel diagnostic techniques and interventions (drug-induced sleep endoscopy) which have now been widely adopted as standard care. She is part of a currently-funded multi-center NIH study looking at treatment of sleep disordered breathing in children with Down Syndrome who did not tolerate positive airway pressure. Importantly, she led a group studying the impact of positive airway pressure on children’s midface anatomy, showing that this common treatment caused significant orthognathic changes. Most currently, she is working with colleagues on the development of a broad Sleep Biobank, archiving sleep study tracings and prospectively studying clinical outcomes, patient reported outcomes, quality of life impacts, molecular correlates, novel diagnostic and analytic techniques. This data repository also includes those with a variety of rare diseases in addition to the general pediatric population.