Baylor College of Medicine/ Texas Childrens Hospital
As a Pediatric Intensivist, I care for critically ill patients with organ failure, pathologic inflammation, and severe infections (sepsis). My overall career goal is to reduce the morbidity and mortality in critically ill children using and enhancing my clinical, educational, and research expertise.
I am deeply passionate about the education of Pediatric Intensivists. As the Associate Program Director of our Pediatric Critical Care Medicine Fellowship Program, I have developed a recurring year-long curriculum for the Pediatric Critical Care Fellows and Advance Practice Providers, both at BCM/TCH and in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine Fellowship Programs across the country. I am also the Fellowship Program Director of our Liver Intensive Care Unit Fellowship Program.
From a clinical standpoint, I am the Associate Director of the TCH Liver Intensive Care Unit (LICU), a transformative group started in 2014 in which a multidisciplinary team of Liver Transplant Surgeons, Hepatologists, and others work together to maximize the outcome for critically ill children with liver failure. The LICU is a novel concept and one in which we have had success in reducing the peri-transplant mortality of patients with liver failure. In addition to critically ill patients with liver failure, I am interested in the how ECMO affects thromboinflammation, testing novel compounds in our in vitro and animal models.
Finally, as a physician-scientist, my research passion lies within the interactions between neutrophils, platelets, and endothelial cells within the microcirculation and how they regulate both inflammation and thrombosis, which are at the heart of many disease we treat in the Intensive Care Unit. My laboratory is working on three areas: (1) developing novel proteins to attenuating inflammation and viral illness, (2) testing novel microfluidic devices in for blood purification, and (3) further identifying platelets’ roles in microvascular inflammation.