2026 New Members

Dr. Krystle Perez is a passionate neonatologist affiliated with the University of Washington (UW) and Seattle Children’s Hospital, where she is well-regarded as an Associate Program Director of the Pediatric Residency Program and as lead of the UW Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia (BPD) team. She is a dedicated core member of the Washington State Perinatal Collaborative and valued by leaders in the Washington State Department of Health as a member. Driven by a profound commitment to justice in health and compassionate, evidence-based care, Dr. Perez has led statewide advocacy efforts—most notably her instrumental role in the drafting and passage of Washington State’s donor milk legislation (RCW 48.43.815), ensuring inpatient insurance coverage for medically necessary donor human milk to support goals of exclusive human milk diets by many families across the state. Her work also spans statewide initiatives to address Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders and addressing systematic barriers to lactation support.  Beyond state advocacy, Dr. Perez’s research portfolio also illustrates her commitment to research, quality improvement and clinical innovation. Most recently, she has co-authored several publications which explore the influence of early nutrition, weight and fluid management on later outcomes among premature newborns. She is actively exploring these associations both in the United States and in Ethiopia, acknowledging the severe limitations in resources and how that may affect outcomes. Stemming from her earlier work examining sildenafil use and BPD in the NICU, Dr. Perez is also active with ongoing development of the UW BPD Team program with data collection ongoing to better inform institutional practices and guidelines to prevent BPD, treat BPD, and support families whose infant(s) have BPD in the inpatient to outpatient transition. Her commitment to patients with BPD and their families is evidenced by recent invitations to speak about BPD management at the Pacific Northwest Association of Neonatal Nursing. Her international collaborations in Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and other low-resource settings have advanced newborn care delivery and highlighted additional social factors influencing maternal–infant outcomes. Additionally, she continues in her efforts to foster important innovations to care for newborns in low resource settings, mentoring several engineering students.    Together, her research and advocacy endeavors underscore Dr. Perez’s mission: to foster healthier beginnings for all newborns and their families—locally and globally.

Dr. Perdita Permaul is a clinical investigator, pediatric allergist and immunologist and an associate professor of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine.  She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, her medical degree at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and completed her pediatric residency at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.  She then moved to Boston and continued her training at Boston Children’s Hospital, where she completed a fellowship in Allergy and Immunology.  Upon completing fellowship, Dr. Permaul continued on as a pediatric allergist and immunologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School until her return to Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Permaul has authored a number of scientific papers, reviews and book chapters on original research showing how indoor allergen exposures affect asthma outcomes in urban children with asthma, both in the school and home environments.  Her current clinical/translational asthma research has been supported by grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the interactions between childhood obesity, the environment, and asthma morbidity in an established cohort of inner-city children with asthma.  Ongoing work has focused on studying how obesity related systemic inflammation contributes to the development of severe asthma in children through profiling of cytokines and other inflammatory and immune mediators. She currently serves as the Weill Cornell Medicine site Principal Investigator for the NIH funded Pandemic Response Repository – Microbial and Immune Surveillance and Epidemiology (PREMISE): Enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) Pilot Study.  The overall objective of this study is to become pandemic ready by demonstrating utility of immunologic surveillance for future emerging pathogens using the emerging pathogen, EV-D68, as the prototype.

Dr. Andrew Place is a pediatric oncologist at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center where he serves as Chief Medical Officer of the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. Dr. Place completed his undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College majoring in Biology and subsequently received his MD and PhD degrees at the Geisel School of Medicine and Dartmouth College. He completed pediatric training at the Boston Combined Residency Program followed by pediatric Hematology/Oncology fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Place is a physician-scientist investigating novel therapies for high-risk pediatric leukemia. He is a nationally recognized clinical trialist, who serves in leadership committees of several large consortia including the Dana-Farber Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) Consortium (Principal Investigator), the Therapeutic Advances in Childhood Leukemia Consortium (Chair, Steering and Prioritization Committee) and the Children’s Oncology Group (Vice Chair, Myeloid Disease Committee).  Dr. Place also served (2018-23) as the Chief Medical Officer of the Institutional Centers for Clinical and Translational Research at Boston Children’s Hospital.  Dr. Place’s research has focused on the design and implementation of early and late–phase trials for patients with acute leukemias.  He has either led or collaborated in the development of trials testing everolimus, selinexor, ribociclib, liposomal vincristine, pegaspargase, dasatinib, azacitidine and venetoclax in pediatric patients with both newly diagnosis and relapsed acute leukemia.  Dr. Place will be the Principal Investigator for the next upfront DFCI ALL Consortium study testing venetoclax in newly diagnosed children and adolescents with ALL.

Dr. Pollard is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Senior Physician at Dana-Farber and Interim Clinical Director of the pediatric hematologic malignancy program at Dana Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. Her primary clinical activities include direct patient care for children with pediatric hematologic malignancies, with expertise in the management of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Her research has focused on the development of novel prognostication tools that help decide which children will require more intense therapy for AML, like hematopoietic stem cell transplant, to minimize risk for disease recurrence. Conversely, this risk stratification also informs which children with more favorable AML can be treated with chemotherapy alone and avoid the toxicity seen with transplant. She also develops clinical trials for the treatment of pediatric AML and related disorders and runs these studies through Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s or via larger cooperative groups like the Children’s Oncology Group (COG).

Dr. Laura Prichett is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of General Pediatrics, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Medicine, Biomedical Informatics & Data Science. She serves as the Associate Director and Faculty Lead for the Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Data Management (BEAD) Core and is a Core Faculty member of the Center for Suicide Prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Trained as an epidemiologist, demographer, and biostatistician, Dr. Prichett brings expertise in working with complex, nationally representative datasets as well as administrative and electronic health record (EHR) data to advance clinical translational research. Dr. Prichett’s research centers on improving the understanding of suicidal thoughts and behaviors among children and adolescents, with particular attention to patterns and trends by sex, race/ethnicity, and age. She also investigates biological mechanisms that may influence mental health, including infections and disruptions in the microbiome. She works to improve care for young patients with suicide risk by using implementation science and engineering approaches to inform systems-level improvements in the screening and treatment of pediatric patients at risk for suicide in emergency and primary care settings. In addition to her research, Dr. Prichett advises investigators across Johns Hopkins on study design and data analysis involving EHR, administrative, and longitudinal data through her leadership role in the BEAD Core. She is a founding co-investigator of the Pediatric COVID AntiBody Study (PCABS), a longitudinal study examining biomarkers related to mental health among ethnoracially minoritized youth. In 2023, she was awarded a two-year Building Interdisciplinary Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) grant to further her interdisciplinary research efforts.

Dr. Mihai Puia-Dumitescu is a neonatologist and physician-scientist whose work focuses on optimizing outcomes for critically ill and medically complex infants. His research integrates critical illness physiology, epidemiologic methods, and clinical trial design to improve neurodevelopmental outcomes and drug therapy in premature and critically ill neonates. His scholarly interests span neurophysiology, pharmacoepidemiology, and neonatal therapeutics, with a growing focus on congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO).  As Co-Director of the CDH Program at Seattle Children’s Hospital, Dr. Puia-Dumitescu leads efforts to build a multidisciplinary center of excellence for infants with CDH, combining clinical innovation, family-centered care, and collaborative research. He also serves as Associate Medical Director of the NICU and Director of Clinical Research for the Division of Neonatology, where he supports faculty development, scholarly productivity, and strategic academic initiatives. Nationally, he is Chair-Elect of the AAP District VIII Section on Neonatal/Perinatal Medicine and a member of the Newborn Brain Society’s Communication and Networking Committee. Through his combined leadership, research, and teaching, Dr. Puia-Dumitrescu is committed to advancing the science and practice of neonatal care.

Vilmaris Quiñones Cardona, MD, MPH, is a neonatologist and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Drexel University College of Medicine. Her academic and clinical interests center on quality improvement science, with a focus on optimizing outcomes for critically ill neonates in Level IV neonatal intensive care units. Dr. Quiñones Cardona’s research also encompasses hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), with particular emphasis on reducing practice variation and improving evidence-based care delivery.

As a cardiac critical care and pulmonary hypertension physician, Dr. Radman is excited to help improve long-term outcomes for pediatric patients through research projects and collaborations.

Her primary scholarly focus is ICU clinical outcomes research, including cardiac lesion-specific outcomes, nutrition/metabolism-related outcomes, and patient family outcomes following ICU discharge. Her work in industry and quality improvement studies has also been productive.

Dr. Radman is an engaged participant in multiple local and national research collaboratives and serves on the leadership committee for Collaborative Research-Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Society (CoRe-PCICS). On the committee, she works with other experts in her field, designing studies, collecting/analyzing data, and writing/editing publications. Dr. Radman focuses on answering specific questions about critically ill children with cardiac disease, including outcomes beyond ICU discharge.

Dr. Vikram Raghu is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh and a pediatric gastroenterologist and transplant hepatologist at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on improving clinical decision-making for children with intestinal failure, intestine transplant, and liver transplant. He specializes in cost-effectiveness analysis and decision modeling, using these methods to evaluate high-risk treatments, guide transplant timing, and support evidence-based, value-driven care for children with complex gastrointestinal conditions. He also leads multicenter studies that use observational data and patient registries to evaluate outcomes and identify disparities, including studies using national datasets such as PHIS and SRTR.

Dr. Raghu has played a central role in the development and analysis of the International Intestinal Failure Registry. He is a co-investigator on an FDA-funded R01 to define the natural history of pediatric intestinal failure and is currently supported by the NASPGHAN Foundation and the Children’s Trust. His work has been published in leading journals including JAMA Network Open, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, JPEN, JPGN, and Pediatric Transplantation. He serves on national committees through NASPGHAN and the Intestinal Rehabilitation and Transplant Association and is committed to building model-based, stakeholder-informed tools that advance high-quality and equitable care in pediatric gastroenterology and transplant medicine.