Seema Rani, MBBS, MD

Seema Rani is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Thomas Jefferson University, Sidney Kimmel Medical College, practicing in the subspeciality of pediatric pulmonology and sleep medicine at Nemours Children’s Health, Delaware.

Most of her childhood and early years were spent growing up in India in humble background. She completed her primary education and medical school in AIMS, Bellur, in India. She practiced in India at AIIMS, New Delhi which is one of busiest hospitals in the country with high acuity of patients. It is there, where she was informed of the USMLE examination, and she decided to pursue a career in medicine in United States. She completed her intern year of residency in pediatrics at Oklahoma University Children’s Hospital and completed her pediatrics residency at Children’s Hospital of Montefiore, in Bronx NY. She completed her pediatric pulmonary fellowship at St Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, where she continued to work as an attending physician and served as the medical director for the division. She completed her sleep medicine fellowship at Temple University.

She joined as a faculty in Nemours Children’s Hospital in 2020. Since being there, she has been an active full-time clinician with a niche for research. She has participated in numerous investigator-initiated and externally funded clinical trials ranging from simple retrospective analyses to complex multi-center interventional clinical trials. She has a passion and unwavering commitment to improving the care of children with Sickle Cell Disease. She was awarded and recently completed grant funded pilot project through NIH COBRE on “Sleep health in children with sickle cell disease”. During her tenure at Nemours, she has published several journal and abstract articles pertaining to sleep disorders in children with sickle cell disease.
She has presented her research work on other pediatric populations with pulmonary and sleep disorders including in children with Down syndrome, Achondroplasia and relationship between hypertension in children without obstructive sleep apnea, at several national and international conferences. She has been mentoring undergraduate students through the Nemours Summer Undergraduate Program (NSURP) and medical students with their research.

Due to her personal experience, interest, and compassion for children with Autism, she has been involved in community work in children with Autism. She was selected for Community funding project through Nemours Children’s Hospital on “Increasing awareness and acceptance of Autism in South Asian community”, Sponsored by Delaware Valley community Engagement Department. She has collaborated with the University of Delaware on several projects and currently serves as coinvestigator on a pilot study awarded by the Maggie E. Neumann Health Sciences Research Fund on “Artificial Intelligence Sleep Chatbots for Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

During these years she has developed skills and required clinical expertise to diagnose and manage pulmonary and sleep disorders with enhanced experience in children with sickle cell disease.