2026 New Members

Dr Aishworiya Ramkumar is a developmental behavioral pediatrician and clinician scientist based in Singapore with a primary research focus on autism spectrum disorder, specifically in predicting and modifying outcomes in children on the autism spectrum. Her secondary research interests lie in environmental influences such as screen time and sleep, on child development including social communication.

She has led and completed several funded studies as principal investigator and published her work in peer reviewed journals. She strongly believes in centering her research on patients and clinical care and is passionate about doing research that translates into clinical improvements. Dr Ramkumar is also the co-lead the workgroup that authored the national Clinical Practice Guidelines for Autism in Children and Adolescents in Singapore in 2023. She is also a member of the Paediatric Ethics and Advocacy Centre (PEACe) in her institution and is actively involved in the teaching and mentoring of undergraduates, residents and fellows. She strives to carve time for excercise and reading fiction books regularly and always has room for chocolates.

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.

Dr. Maria del Mar Romero Lopez is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at McGovern Medical School, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and a member of the Institute for Clinical Research and Learning Health Care. She is a board-certified neonatologist, holding an MD from the University of Valencia (Spain), an MS in Child Psychology, and a PhD in Physiology and Metabolism (Cum Laude) from Universidad Autónoma Madrid (Spain). Dr. Romero Lopez completed her pediatric residency training in Spain and Michigan, followed by a fellowship in neonatal-perinatal medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Dr. Romero Lopez has established herself as an independent investigator focused on improving evidence-based care and outcomes for extremely preterm infants, with particular expertise in vitamin D metabolism, bone health assessment, and nutritional interventions. As Principal Investigator, she has secured extramural funding, including a KL2 Career Development Award, an R03 from NIH NCATs, a Gerber Foundation National Research Grant, and a grant from the Bone Disease Program of Texas. Her ViDES trial (NCT05459298) represents the largest randomized controlled trial of vitamin D supplementation in extremely preterm infants to date, completing the enrollment of 180 participants in June 2025. She employs innovative methodologies, including quantitative ultrasound speed of sound measurements for bone health evaluation, as well as state-of-the-art liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry for vitamin D metabolite analysis. Her work has been published and presented at major national and international conferences, and she serves as site Principal Investigator for multiple multicenter trials.

Dr. Julia Rosenberg is a general pediatrician and health services researcher committed to advancing health equity for children. She completed her training at Cornell University, Weill Cornell Medical College, Yale Pediatric Residency, and the Yale National Clinician Scholars Program, a postdoctoral research fellowship. She currently serves as Associate Director of the Yale Pediatric Refugee and Immigrant Clinic.  Dr. Rosenberg leads transdisciplinary, community-engaged research focused on improving health care access for historically marginalized populations. Her work supports immigrant children and families through preventive interventions and policy-relevant evaluations. She collaborates with community organizations, including refugee resettlement agencies and local leaders, to design and implement community-informed studies. Her recent projects include evaluating preventive mental health interventions for refugee children, validating mental health screening tools, and conducting mixed methods analyses of maternal-infant dyadic care. She has also performed secondary dataset analyses to assess the association of public health insurance eligibility policies with access to care and preventive service use for children in immigrant families.

Dr. Jennifer Rumpel is a physician scientist and neonatologist committed to improving outcomes for infants through high quality hypothesis-driven research. She is actively involved in multidisciplinary research through the Children’s Hospitals Neonatal Consortium (CHNC).  The projects that she has led through the CHNC have focused on neonatal acute kidney injury (AKI) and AKI-associated mortality through the ADVANCE project and additional kidney-focused research.  Dr. Rumpel led multicenter research investigating the utility of urinary biomarkers and near infrared spectroscopy for early identification of AKI in neonates.  Dr. Rumpel enjoys multidisciplinary research including her work through Near4Neos which is a multicenter international collaborative committed to improving the safety and success of endotracheal intubations in infants.  Recently she has focused on advancing her skills in machine learning approaches and data science through the pursuit of a PhD in clinical and translational science.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Salazar, MD, MSHP, is an Assistant Professor of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Salazar’s research evaluates how the financing, structures, hospital operations, and processes of the perinatal health system impact the quality of care and outcomes for both low-acuity and high-acuity neonatal populations.

She has a special interest in moderate and late preterm infants, as a parent of two late preterm infants. Her other interests include interventions to improve social determinants of health, such as cash transfers, and the role of hospital ownership structures on patient outcomes. Dr. Salazar completed her medical and research training at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

I am a pediatric critical care physician at Children’s Nebraska and an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and the Department of Physiology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. My research focuses on changes to the microbiome in congenital heart disease. Recognizing that changes to the microbiome in critical illness influence outcomes, I began to ask if similar changes in patients with altered gut perfusion or low oxygen states associated with congenital heart defects have similar alterations in their gut flora. As cardiopulmonary bypass causes significant inflammation following cardiac surgery, these changes to the microbiome, could influence patient outcomes.
My goals are to understand the mechanistic role the intestinal microbiome and metabolome have in both local and systemic inflammatory signaling as well as develop therapeutics to improve gut health in children with congenital heart disease and improve patient outcomes.

I also partner with other investigators evaluating a variety of disease populations to understand the role of dysbiosis and pathophysiology. The impact of the microbiome on a variety of disease states continues to grow, but little has been invested into pediatric disease processes, such drug metabolism and graft versus host disease in transplant patients, nutrition in pediatric ARDS, and the microbiome in neurosurgery. Understanding the role of gut health in a variety of diseases has the potential to help a multitude of patients across the spectrum.

Dr. Melissa Scala is a neonatologist and Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University. Her research primarily focuses on understanding physiologic mechanisms and best care practices for inpatient infant developmental care in the neonatal intensive care unit. Particular areas of interest have included skin-to-skin care, infant language exposure and parental mental health. The use of medical technologies to predict infant brain health and future neurodevelopmental outcomes is also an area of past and future exploration. Her lab leverages technology to change and understand the NICU care environment through bedside monitor data, brain imaging and sound devices. She also serves as program director for the neonatology fellowship at Stanford, mentoring the next generation of leaders in neonatology. Mentorship of young investigators is core to her career.  She completed her medical training at Georgetown University, pediatric residency at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and fellowship at Georgetown University.