Highlights

• Arun Gupta, MD, was promoted to Clinical Professor.
• Sonia Bonifacio, MD, was an editor on a Pediatric Research volume regarding training in neonatal neurocritical care. It was published by the Newborn Brain Society Guidelines and Publications Committee.
  
• Dr. Bonifacio, Shamita Punjabi, MD, and Elizabeth Blecharczyk, MD, were selected as mentors for Stanford Leadership Education in Advancing Diversity (LEAD). LEAD is 10-month longitudinal leadership program for Stanford residents and fellows to (1) develop leadership and scholarship skills in addressing issues related to equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), (2) produce leaders in academic medicine dedicated to EDI, and (3) improve the culture of medicine.
• Shazia Bhombal, MD, was the speaker and facilitator of a Universtiy of Southern California echo course entitled “Point of Care Echocardiography in the Neonate.”

Highlights

• This summer, we welcomed three new fellows to Stanford. Our Class of 2024 Fellows include Hannah Gu, MD, Faith Myers, MD, and Sheila Razdan, MD, and we’re thrilled to have them join us! Gu completed her residency at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Myers at the University of Minnesota, and Razdan at Washington University in St. Louis/St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
  
• Meera Sankar, MD, and colleagues successfully passed an AAP resolution during the Annual Leadership Forum (ALF) in August. Sankar and SoNPM Chapter colleagues John Takayama and Mindy Gu drafted the resolution titled "Facilitate Communication between Physician and Parents and Patients with Limited English Proficiency.”
• Shamita Punjabi, MD, and Elizabeth Blecharczyk, MD, are developing a neonatal health disparities curriculum for pediatric residents, and were recently named recipients of the 2021-2023 Picker Gold Challenge Grants for Residency Training (along with Becky Blankenburg, MD, MPH). The 18-month grants are designed to support innovative projects within the graduate medical education setting designed to encourage patient-centered care.
  
• Arun Gupta, MD, is the recipient of the inaugural AAP Section on Hospital Medicine Service Award, honoring his contributions as the co-chair of the section’s Subcommittee on Neonatal Hospitalists. The new award recognizes an individual’s efforts to optimize the delivery of health care to children in an inpatient setting; improve quality of care for children; serve the highest priority needs of the membership; and advance the pediatric hospitalist profession through leadership and advocacy.
  
• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded Anca Pasca, MD, a three-year grant of $1.4 million to identify drugs that may be protective against neonatal hypoxic ischemic brain injury. She will use gray matter organoids derived from induced pluripotent stem cells to develop platforms for simultaneously screening hundreds or thousands of compounds, with the goal of finding candidate drugs that may improve neurodevelopmental outcomes of babies.
  
• William Benitz, MD, is co-editor of the sixth edition of the textbook Fetal and Neonatal Physiology, which was published this past summer.
  
• Jochen Profit, MD, MPH, was awarded a five-year grant (2021-2026), an R01 from NIH focusing on analysis of the Asian/Pacific Islanders subpopulations and disparities in their care and outcomes across CA. Profit is PI along with Elliott Main, Medical Director of the California Quality Care Collaborative.
• This is the second consecutive year that Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford has been ranked in the top five neonatology programs in the country by U.S. News & World Report. We are immensely proud of our entire Stanford team!

Highlights

• Henry Lee, MD, Arun Gupta, MD, and Lou Halamek, MD, are assistant editors of the Textbook of Neonatal Resuscitation (NRP) 8^th Edition, which was published in earlier in 2021.
• Sonia Bonifacio, MD, co-edited a 2-volume edition for Seminars in Fetal and Neonatal Medicine, reviewing/editing articles, writing several of her own, and developing a care bundle for neonatal encephalopathy. Bonifacio was also an invited speaker at the AAP 2021 National Conference in October and Exhibition and the Irish Neonatal Annual Symposium in November.
  
• Jadene Wong, MD, was promoted to Clinical Associate Professor.
  
• Meera Sankar, MD, was promoted to Clinical Professor.
  
• Dr. Lee and David Stevenson, MD, were recipients of the Department of Pediatrics 2021 Awards. Dr. Lee received the Clinical Excellence Award, and David Stevenson received the Basic Science Award.
  

Highlights

• Our Division had a strong showing at this year’s virtual PAS with 28 posters, 14 platforms, 1 panel and 1 workshop. Many were presented live or made available on-demand.
  
• A high-profile paper published in the Science Translational Medicine shows how researchers are getting closer to predicting the onset of labor. Findings reveal changes in the maternal metabolome, proteome, and immunome that are associated with a shift from ongoing pregnancy to a pre-labor phase of 2-4 weeks. Stanford co-authors include Laura Peterson, MD, Gary Darmstadt, MD, Gary Shaw, DrPH, and David Stevenson, MD.
  
• Chandani DeZure, MD, was invited by the Ministry of Health for the Republic of Kazakhstan to give a keynote lecture on COVID-19 in newborns.

Highlights

• William Benitz, MD, is the recipient of the 2020 Avroy Fanaroff Education Award. He will be honored on April 22 at the 2020 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Section on Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Virtual Awards Ceremony. According to AAP, the Fanaroff Education Award is “bestowed upon an individual in recognition of outstanding contributions to the dissemination of knowledge in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine for health care students, professionals or the lay public.”
• Janene Fuerch, MD, will be a panelist at the Stanford Children’s Health Pediatric Innovation Showcase on April 23. This annual event brings together innovators, researchers, clinicians, and industry experts to showcase the development of pediatric technologies at Stanford and elsewhere.
  
• Ron Cohen, MD, was a guest speaker and faculty expert on a webinar for pediatricians and staff from academic and private institutions in the state of Gujarat, India. His talk was entitled “ABCs of ventilator management.”
  
• Kari McCallie, MD, and Malathi Balasundaram, MD, have been selected to present at the Children’s Hospital Neonatal Consortium Annual Symposium in November 2021. The presentation is entitled “No Place Like Home,” and they will discuss how to improve NICU discharge education and preparation for families. To learn more about their success in improving parent satisfaction with discharge planning, read a recent study they published in Advances in Neonatal Care.
  
• Gary Darmstadt, MD, MS, was appointed to the Advisory Board of the Universal Scientific Education and Research Network (USERN), and received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Johns Hopkins University.
  
• On April 15, Ritu Chitkara, MD, presented during a workshop on advanced communication hosted by the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Clinical Leaders Group.

• Congratulations to our neonatal-perinatal medicine fellows Jonathan Reiss, MD, and John Feister, MD!
  • Dr. Reiss (Class of 2022) was honored with the Society for Pediatric Research (SPR) Fellow's Clinical Research Award for his work entitled "Newborn Screen Metabolic Panels Reflect the Impact of Common Disorders of Pregnancy and Capture Aberrant Fetal Growth Patterns.” The SPR Fellows' Clinical Research Awards are given annually to pediatricians in training who intend to pursue careers in academic medicine. Dr. Reiss will present his abstract at the Pediatric Academic Societies virtual 2021 meeting.
  • Dr. Feister (Class of 2023) was awarded funding from the Stanford Maternal & Child Health Research Institute to pursue a Master’s degree in Health Policy.

Highlights

• The California Perinatal Quality Care Collaborative and California Association of Neonatologists jointly awarded El Camino Hospital NICU Family-Centered Care Committee (FCC) the 2021 David Wirtschafter Award. Named in honor of a leader in neonatal quality improvement, the award is given to NICU quality improvement leaders or teams whose contributions impact their unit and the larger neonatal community. The El Camino Hospital NICU FCC formed in 2016 under the leadership of Stanford neonatologists, including FCC Chair Malathi Balasundaram, MD. By integrating parents as active participants in every aspect of the NICU experience, the FCC has made tangible improvements for El Camino Hospital NICU babies and their families. The Wirtschafter Award recognizes several achievements by the FCC, including the creation of a Family Advisory Board of over 25 former NICU parents, establishment of a parent buddy program, development of technology-based discharge education, improved rates of early hand expression of breast milk, and earlier and more consistent kangaroo care. Full list of team members can be found here.
• Nilima Ragavan, MD, was invited to speak about the pandemic response and what comes next by Indiaspora, an organization dedicated to transforming the success of the Indian diaspora to have meaningful impact worldwide. The conversation was broadcast on Facebook Live.
  
• At the annual meeting of the Consortium of Universities in Global Health, Gary Darmstadt, MD, MS, presented an abstract on gender and the impact of COVID-19 on demand for and access to healthcare. Dr. Darmstadt and his colleagues analyzed data from Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, and found the pandemic had a detrimental effect on health care access for South African women, especially those with no post-secondary education. No significant change in behavior was noted for South African men, or Kenyans or Nigerians of either gender. An abstract with these findings was published in the Lancet Global Health.
  
• Jochen Profit, MD, MPH, guest edited a special issue in Seminars in Perinatology on racial/ethnic disparities in NICU care. He also was a co-author on several articles in the issue. Dr. Profit also was awarded the Kristine Sandberg Knisely Lectureship from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and spoke about addressing disparities in perinatal care delivery.
  
• Lance Prince, MD, PhD, wrote an article entitled “Advancing Precision Medicine in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit with Big Data and Innovative Noninvasive Sensors” that was featured in the Spring 2021 issue of Neonatal Intensive Care. Neonatal Intensive Care is sent to more than 10,500 healthcare professionals specializing in neonatology and perinatology, fetal medicine, and related disciplines.
• Our Stanford NICU team at El Camino Hospital has developed discharge educational content for parents that is fully integrated into the electronic health record, available at every bedside, and introduced early during hospitalization. Due to increased focus on discharge planning, patient satisfaction surveys show that parents today feel more prepared to take home their babies. Overwhelmingly, 92% of parents highly rated the discharge content. Full findings are reported in a recent study published in Advances in Neonatal Care. Lead author is Dr. Balasundaram, and senior author is Kari McCallie, MD. Co-authors include Stephanie Miller, MD, and Dharshi Sivakumar, MD. 

Highlights

• Results from a significant Neonatal Research Network trial on hemoglobin transfusion thresholds for preterm infants was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers found that higher hemoglobin thresholds for red-cell transfusions did not improve survival without neurodevelopmental impairment at 22 and 26 months in children born at extremely low birthweights. Stanford co-authors include Susan Hintz, MD, MS Epi, and Valerie Chock, MD, MS Epi.
• Sonia Bonifacio, MD, presented at the Mexican Congress of Neonatology about neuromonitoring in the NICU.