2026 New Members

Dr. Kristy Murray serves as the Chief Research Officer at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Professor and Executive Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University. Prior to her appointment in 2024, she served as the Vice Chair for Research for the Department of Pediatrics and Professor of Pediatrics in the section of Pediatric Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. She also served as the Assistant Dean for Faculty and Academic Development for the National School of Tropical Medicine and Director of the Center for Human Immunobiology at Texas Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Murray received her doctorate in Veterinary Medicine from Texas A&M University and her PhD in Preventative Medicine and Community Health, Clinical Investigations track, at the University of Texas Medical Branch. She spent the first five years of her career at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including two years as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer conducting outbreak investigations, including the initial outbreak of West Nile virus in New York City in 1999, bubonic plague in Wyoming, and unexplained illness and deaths in injection drug users in Ireland. She also worked on the polio eradication campaign in Bangladesh and researched lyssaviruses in the Philippines. She received several awards at CDC including the Secretary’s Award for Distinguished Service for her work on the West Nile virus Encephalitis Investigation Team and for the Anthrax Investigation Emergency Response Team.

In 2002, Dr. Murray transitioned to a career in academia. Her research over the past 25+ years has been focused on both laboratory- and clinically-based studies related to emerging infectious diseases, including West Nile virus, dengue, rickettsia, Chagas disease, Zika virus, COVID-19, and rabies. Her field studies are predominately based in global health settings, including Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, Mexico, and the Philippines. She teaches graduate-level courses on epidemiology, biostatistics, and infectious diseases. In 2013, she received the Bailey Ashford Medal from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) for her work in tropical medicine, and she became a Fellow of ASTMH in 2024. She was elected to the American Pediatric Society in 2018. Dr. Murray is an Associate Editor for PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and serves on the editorial board of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology and Infection. She has authored more than 170 scientific and technical papers and serves on a committee for the National Academy for Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

She is a physician scientist and her research efforts focus on incorporating novel cellular therapies for relapsed hematological malignancies in the transplant setting. She has conducted several investigator-initiated clinical studies as Principal or Co-investigator of institutional and multicenter trials and her research projects have been funded on NIH grants, charitable foundations and Biotech. She is currently Associate Member in the Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital where she is the Co-Director of the clinical cell therapy program.

Dr. Margaret Nguyen is the Associate Division Chief of Research at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego and an Associate Clinical Professor at the University of California San Diego. A graduate of the Pediatric Community Track at Children’s National Medical Center and Howard University, Dr. Nguyen has been passionate about understanding and addressing community health.  Recognizing the potential for geographical information systems (GIS) to delineate community health disparities, she pursued GIS training at Carnegie Mellon University during her Pediatric Emergency Medicine (PEM) fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Today, Dr. Nguyen stands out as one of the few PEM researchers who applies innovative uses of GIS and spatial analysis to emergency pediatrics. Her research uniquely focuses on health equity, health services utilization in vulnerable populations, and the critical impacts of climate on local pediatric health.  Beyond her pioneering spatial analysis approaches, Dr. Nguyen also integrates qualitative research into pediatric emergency medicine and champions team-based research. She supports junior faculty in developing a qualitative research network and actively contributes to multi-center collaborations such as the Pediatric Emergency Medicine Kawasaki Disease Research Group (PEMKDRG) and serves as site-PI for the National Emergency Airway Registry (NEAR4PEM).

Dr. Niehaus is a neonatologist who is focused on improvement of processes surrounding the care of clinically ill newborns.  His primary research has been in the realm of medical education looking at the impact of empathetic communication skills training for pediatric residents.  Communication with families when they are at their most vulnerable is an incredibly important skill.  Improving this interaction with families has been the focus of Dr. Niehaus’ research.  Additionally, Dr. Niehaus has looked at ways to advocate for resources in under-resourced areas.  His project looking at healthcare utilization at the end of life in cancer patients emphasized the importance of funding pediatric palliative care.  His project looking at social determinants of health and the association with necrotizing enterocolitis.  The hope is to advocate for more community resources to help prevent necrotizing enterocolitis.

Dr. Kristen Noble, MD, PhD is a neonatologist and basic scientist who studies the intrauterine immune response to infection during pregnancy. Dr. Noble earned a bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University, followed by her MD/PhD degrees from Meharry Medical College. She matriculated through pediatric residency at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, TN and then returned to Vanderbilt for fellowship in Neonatology. She stayed as faculty at Vanderbilt prior to her recent move in 2024 to Indiana University where she is now an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics. Dr. Noble received a K08 career development award from the NICHD to focus on the placental host immune response to bacterial infection as a function of gestational age during pregnancy.

Krysten North is a neonatologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, and an Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She completed her undergraduate studies at Grove City College, her medical degree at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and her Master’s in Public Health from the Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health. For her clinical training, she did her pediatric residency at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and her neonatal-perinatal medical fellowship at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Dr. North studies the impact of early nutrition on growth and neurodevelopment in small, vulnerable newborns living in low- and middle-income countries. She has received a K23-award from NICHD to evaluate the relationship between maternal micronutrient supplementation, breast milk B-complex vitamin composition, and infant neurodevelopment in Ethiopia. Her research also includes analyses of breast milk composition among a lactation cohort in rural Bangladesh, a study of low-birthweight breastfeeding competency and growth in India, Malawi, and Tanzania, as well as a series of studies related to infant neurodevelopment in Ethiopia. Dr. North is also passionate about training the next generation of physicians globally, and routinely teaches neonatal resuscitation and other newborn topics to clinicians working in a range of settings.

Dr. Nugent is a pediatric nephrologist and general pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine and an Investigator at Yale’s Clinical and Translational Research Accelerator. He completed his medical degree at Duke University School of Medicine and his residency training in Pediatrics at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Following residency, Dr. Nugent served as an active duty general pediatrician in the United States Air Force for four years. He then completed his fellowship training in Pediatric Nephrology at Yale School of Medicine.

Dr. Nugent’s research is focused on improving the diagnosis, evaluation, and treatment of children with hypertension at the intersection of primary care and pediatric nephrology. The objective of his current research is to develop and test implementation strategies to increase the guideline-recommended use of blood pressure monitoring outside the clinic. Dr. Nugent’s long-term goal is to use implementation science to reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease across the lifespan.

Katherine M. Ottolini, M.D., is an Attending Neonatologist at Children’s National Hospital and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Dr. Ottolini first realized the importance of nutrition as a modifiable intervention for the health of preterm infants as a pediatric resident at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. As a neonatology fellow, she investigated the impact of early nutrition on preterm brain development during the extrauterine third trimester using advanced quantitative brain magnetic resonance imaging in the Developing Brain Institute at Children’s National Hospital. After serving as a neonatologist in the U.S. Air Force in Okinawa, Japan for four years, she returned to Children’s National Hospital to continue investigating the relationship between preterm nutrition, growth, and neurodevelopment. She remains dedicated to employing innovative, non-invasive methods, including human milk analysis and quantitative brain magnetic resonance imaging, to address critical knowledge gaps regarding the ideal nutritional interventions to support optimal preterm growth and brain development throughout the extrauterine third trimester.

Dr. Anand Patel is a pediatric oncologist and physician-scientist who trained at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where he now leads an independent research program as an Assistant Member. His clinical and scientific background in pediatric solid tumors, combined with expertise in computational biology and experimental modeling, uniquely positions him to investigate the molecular drivers of cancer heterogeneity.  Dr. Patel’s lab focuses on dissecting the dynamic regulation of cell states in rhabdomyosarcoma and other childhood sarcomas, with the overarching goal of understanding how intratumoral heterogeneity contributes to treatment failure and disease recurrence. His team integrates single-cell transcriptomics, CRISPR-based perturbation screens, and experimental models of sarcoma to map tumor ecosystems and functionally test the regulators that sustain plasticity and adaptation. Dr. Patel’s lab has made impactful discoveries, including the identification of rare, stem-like cells in rhabdomyosarcoma that shape tumor behavior and therapeutic response.  Through this work, Dr. Patel aims to move beyond static models of tumor classification toward a dynamic, state-based understanding of pediatric cancers. His long-term objective is to translate these mechanistic insights into new therapeutic strategies that target the specific vulnerabilities of heterogeneous tumors, ultimately improving outcomes for children with hard-to-treat cancers.