Scientific Subcommittee
John Barks, M.D. is a Professor of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases at the University of Michigan, and the Director of the Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, where he has been on the faculty since 1990. Dr. Barks earned his M.D. from Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He completed his training in Pediatrics at the I.W. Killam Hospital for Children in Halifax and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He trained in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and the University of Michigan. Dr. Barks’ clinical and laboratory research interests are in neonatal neurology, neuroprotection and mechanisms of neonatal brain injury. Special clinical interests include hypothermia treatment of neonatal brain injury, neonatal seizures and imaging of the neonatal brain.
Frank van Bel MD, PhD, University Medical Center/Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital, Utrecht, the Netherlands, was born in Tilburg, The Netherlands, August 12th, 1949. He was educated as a medical doctor at the Free University in Amsterdam and as a Pediatrician-Neonatologist at the State University in Leiden, The Netherlands. He worked a year as visiting research fellow at the CardioVascular Research Institute of the UCSF in San Francisco. He has been appointed as full professor in Neonatology, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands in 1996. He published 256 international peer reviewed papers up to now, collaborated on several book chapters and has been invited on a regular base for lectures at international fora. His special interest is neonatal neurology, especially in Brain monitoring and neuroprotection and performs experimental as well as clinical research in this field. He supervised up to 28 PhD students.
Robert Clancy is a native of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania who received his Bachelor of Science degrees in mathematics and chemistry from Georgetown University and medical doctor degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore Maryland. He performed his internship and residency training in general pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and pediatric neurology and clinical neurophysiology fellowships at Stanford University Hospital in Palo Alto California.
He joined the faculty of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1981 and is now Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics. He is the founder and former director of the Pediatric Regional Epilepsy Program of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and holder of the Tristram C. Colket, Jr., Endowed Chair in Pediatric Neurology. His clinical and research interests include neonatal EEG, neonatal seizures, neuroprotection, pediatric EEG and epilepsy. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and co-author of the three-volume collection: “Atlas of Electroencephalography” and the interactive DVDs “The Normal Neonatal EEG” and “The Abnormal Neonatal EEG and Seizures”. He currently lives in Wayne, Pennsylvania and enjoys doting on daughters Maggie, Maira, Caitlin, Kelly and Laura and granddaughters Fiona and Kira.
Mohamed El-Dib is the Director of the Neonatal Neurocritical Care Program. He is a board-certified neonatologist with specialized training in the field of Neonatal Neurology and Brain Development. His field of expertise is bedside neuromonitoring. He leads a multidisciplinary group of neonatologists, specialized NICU nurses, pediatric neurologists, neurosurgeons, neuroradiologists, and pharmacists who work collaboratively to provide state-of-the-art care for those at risk for or with established brain injury. His focus of research has been cerebrovascular changes and prediction of outcome in premature infants, including neuroprotection for neonates with neonatal encephalopathy.
Alistair Jan Gunn, Professor, Physiology and Paediatrics, a Paediatrician-scientist in the Department of Physiology at the University of Auckland, has conducted groundbreaking research into the mechanisms and treatment of asphyxial brain injury, identifying compromised fetuses in labour and prevention of life threatening events in infancy. His research helped to establish mild cooling as the first ever technique to reduce brain injury due to low oxygen levels at birth. This simple and effective treatment is now standard care around the world.
John Hartline is a neonatologist and a member of the Neonatal-Perinatal Section of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Now retired, he served the Academy as the Editor-in-Chief of NeoReviewsPlus©, the peer-reviewed self-assessment exercise published monthly by the AAP in conjunction with NeoReviews.org, its online Neonatology state of the art review. Dr Hartline was graduated from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and he completed fellowship in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, after which he practiced neonatology at the regional NICU in Kalamazoo, serving southwestern Michigan. During that interval, he organized 31 consecutive annual symposia for Michigan colleagues and taught medical ethics courses for college and medical students. He also served on the board and as President of the National Perinatal Association, a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to improving perinatal care. At the AAP, Dr Hartline has served as the District V representative to the Neonatal-Perinatal Section executive committee, program committee member and chair of the Section’s annual Workshop, and chair of the Section’s committee on practice. His other interests include the transition from training to academic or private practice, impact of the environment on fetal and neonatal development, quality improvement, and international perspectives in neonatal practice. Dr. Hartline has ongoing interest in professionals’ adoption and/or rejection of clinical strategies as new or innovative medications or devices are introduced.
Lena Hellström-Westas, MD, PhD, is Professor of Perinatal Medicine at Uppsala University, and Senior Consultant in Neonatology at the Department of Neonatology, Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden. She is Medical Co-Director at the Karolinska NIDCAP center and Scientific advisor in Neonatology to the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. Lena Hellström-Westas received her medical degree at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm but received most of her clinical training at Lund University Hospital, Sweden. It was also in Lund the pioneering research on amplitude-integrated EEG monitoring started with focus on early prediction of outcome in asphyxiated infants and preterm infants, seizure detection, sleep and pain assessments
Renée Shellhaas, MD, MS is a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics (Neurology Division) at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, MI. She is a board certified child neurologist and clinical neurophysiologist. Her neonatal brain research focus is neonatal neuromonitoring and she has conducted studies which evaluate the roles of conventional EEG, amplitude-integrated EEG, near-infrared spectroscopy, and polysomnography for infants in the NICU. She currently leads collaborative multicenter studies regarding neonatal seizures and early-life epilepsy, as well as sleep in infants with myelomeningocele. Her clinical practice is centered around seizures and epilepsy in infants and children.
Robert White grew up in Michigan, attended the University of Notre Dame, and received his medical training at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Since 1981, he has been Director of the Regional Newborn Program at Memorial Hospital of South Bend, Indiana. Dr. White has had a long-standing interest in the effect of the NICU environment on babies, families, and caregivers with many publications on that topic. He is chairman of the Consensus Committee that develops Recommended Standards for Newborn ICU Design, co-chair of the annual Gravens Conference on the Physical and Developmental Environment of the High-Risk Newborn, and chairman of the International Conference on Brain Monitoring and Neuroprotection in the Newborn. He has appointments at the University of Notre Dame and the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Dr. White is the American Academy of Pediatrics representative to and co-chair of the AAMI Committee on Incubators, the US representative to the International Electrotechnical Equipment Working Group for Paediatric Equipment, and a member of the Healthcare Guidelines Revision Committee.
Linda S de Vries trained as a pediatrician and neonatologist in the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital in Utrecht. Subsequently she also trained as a pediatric neurologist. From 1989 June 2019, she has worked as a Professor in Neonatal Neurology in the department of Neonatology in Utrecht. She is now an emeritus Professor at the Department of Neonatology in Utrecht and Leiden.
Her research focuses on prediction of neurodevelopmental outcome in high risk preterm and full-term newborns, using neurophysiology and neuro-imaging methods. These at risk children were also seen by her in the follow-up clinic. She has a special interest in neonatal stroke and brain plasticity.
Faculty
Topun Austin is a Consultant Neonatologist in Cambridge and Honorary Professor of Neurophotonics at University College London and is the lead in the Evelyn Perinatal Imaging Centre (EPIC), based at the Rosie Hospital, Cambridge. The research interests of the group are in the development of monitoring and imaging technologies to identify vulnerable infants at an early stage. Topun’s research interests are in brain injury and imaging in the newborn.
Manon Benders is qualified as a consulting neonatologist in the Wilhelmina Children’s hospital of the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands, since 2006. Earlier she worked as a senior clinical lecturer at King’s college London and honary consultant in Neonatology at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in 2014. Currently she is chair of the Department of Neonatology, in the Wilhelmina Children’s hospital of the University Medical Center in Utrecht.
During her training she did a junior research fellowship (Prof. dr. F. Walther) in 1997 at UCLA, USA and a neonatal neurology research fellowship at the University of Geneva (Prof. dr. P.S. Hüppi) in 2006-2007.
Her research focus is on brain injury, development and predicting outcome using neonatal neuro-imaging. Advanced quantification techniques appear to give the opportunity to detect subtle differences, which are helpful in predicting neurodevelopmental outcome and evaluating neuroprotective/ neurodegenerative strategies to reduce brain injury, which is the other part of her research. In this research field she is supervising several PhD students and clinical research fellows, coordinating in different national and international research projects, in clinical as well as experimental studies.
James Boardman is a Professor of Neonatal Medicine and scientific director of the Jennifer Brown Research Laboratory situated in the MRC Centre for Reproductive Health at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Boardman researches the role of quantitative magnetic resonance imaging to investigate brain development of fetuses and neonates, factors that confer risk or resilience to perinatal brain injury, and the relationship between quantitative MR features and long-term functional outcome.
Lina Chalak is an Associate Professor in Pediatrics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX. Her clinical and translational research expertise is focused on neonatal brain injury with >50 highlighted publications related to Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE) identification and therapies, the neurovascular unit and cerebral autoregulation. She has received multiple grant awards including NIH KL2 and K23 awards, a CTSA award and a Gerber Foundation grant.
Currently funded research projects include: Studies of cerebrovascularautoregulationand neuronal biomarkers to segregate clinical injury severity, including mild encephalopathy, study of neuronal and systemic inflammatory serum biomarkers involved in neuronal injury pathways, studies of dysfunctionalautoregulationin newborns with moderate to severe HIE undergoing hypothermia therapy. Contributions to science are found at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/lina.chalak.1/bibliography/44030699/public/?sort=date&direction=descending
Eugene Dempsey is a Consultant Neonatologist in the Cork University Maternity Hospital and Clinical Professor of Paediatrics in the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health, University College Cork. He qualified from University College Cork in 1995, trained in Ireland before moving to McGill University, Montreal where he completed subspeciality training in Neonatology at the Royal Victoria Hospital and Montreal Children’s Hospital (2002-2005). He returned to Ireland and worked as a Consultant Neonatologist in Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital and Our Lady’s Hospital for Children Crumlin. He moved to his current post in Cork University Maternity Hospital in Nov 2007.
He is a PI in The INFANT Centre and also a PI in the HRB funded Mother and Baby Network. He was Chief Investigator for the HIP Trial, an investigator led multi centre, randomised, controlled trial of hypotension management in the extremely low gestational age newborn, funded by the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).
Prof. Dempsey is a member of a number of National and International committees. He is the recipient of several national and international research awards. He currently lectures at both the RCSI and the RCPI. He has supervised a number of PhDs, in particular higher degrees addressing brain injury in both preterm and term infants.
Afif EL-Khuffash is a Consultant Neonatologist at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, and a Clinical Professor of Paediatrics at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. His primary clinical and research area is the assessment heart function in term and preterm neonates. He is the lead for neonatal echocardiography and heart function assessment in the neonatal intensive care unit in the Rotunda Hospital. He is also a board certified lactation consultant.
Prof EL-Khuffash completed a fellowship in neonatal cardiology in Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin. He has explored the use of novel technology in monitoring the cardiovascular function of preterm and sick term infants and was part devising the only neonatal echo training course in Canada. He co-devised the world’s first echo teaching website and mobile device app. Recently, Prof EL-Khuffash has assumed a leadership role at a European level in devising training guidelines for echocardiography by the Neonatologist. He is the lead author/editor of the Haemodynamic Module in the NOTE project, offering a new international online Masters level educational programme in neonatal medicine as collaboration between the European Society for Neonatology (ESN) and the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Southampton.
Hannah Glass is a neonatal neurologist, founding co-director of the Neurointensive Care Nursery (NICN), and Director of Neonatal Critical Care Services at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. She is also the program director of the Neonatal Neurology Fellowship Program. Dr. Glass joined the Division of Child Neurology at UCSF in 2006. She earned a medical degree at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and completed pediatrics and child neurology training at the University of Calgary. She trained in Neonatal Neurology and earned a master’s degree in clinical research at UCSF.
Dr. Glass specializes in brain focused care for children with neurological conditions diagnosed in the newborn period, including hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, stroke and seizures, as well as brain injury following preterm birth. Dr. Glass has received funding from the NIH, March of Dimes, Cerebral Palsy Alliance, Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute and the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Foundation to conduct research that aims to improve developmental outcomes following newborn brain injury.
Gorm Greisen is a Professor of Paediatrics and consultant neonatologist in Juliane Marie Centre and University of Copenhagen. Heading research in neonatal brain perfusion, oxygenation, brain injury, and neurodevelopmental deficits and perinatal growth. Primary investigator in the SafeBoosC project. Clinical coordinator of the NEOMUNE project. Steering committee member in four European research and educational projects. President for the European Society of Paediatric research and for the International Pediatric Research Foundation. Chairman of a regional research ethics committee. Chairman of The Danish Council of Ethics.
Terrie Inder is a dual boarded newborn medicine physician and child neurologist with a research focus in the newborn brain. I also undertake clinical service within the neonatal intensive care unit. As all our research activities are clinical investigations, our studies and clinical care of high risk infants are tightly integrated. My research is targeted at understanding the timing, mechanisms and impact of cerebral injury and altered cerebral development in the human infant. Thus, my studies have focused on infants at high risk for brain injury including the prematurely-born infant, the sick term-born infant, and the infant with congenital heart disease. We aim to investigate means of accurate, early diagnosis of brain injury as well as developing treatments and preventive strategies to reduce subsequent disabilities. This research work has utilized technologies including near infrared spectroscopy, electroencephalography and magnetic resonance imaging. In 2013, I moved to become the Chair of a new Department of Pediatric Newborn Medicine at the Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston.
Monica Lemmon, MD is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Population Health Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. Dr. Lemmon directs Duke’s Fetal and Neonatal Neurology program and serves as core faculty within the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy. Her research portfolio centers around shared decision making for critically ill children, parent-clinician communication, and the development of patient and parent-centered outcomes. Her work has been funded by the American Academy of Neurology, National Palliative Care Research Center, and National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Neil Marlow is Professor of Neonatal Medicine at University College London and current Chair of the NHS England Neonatal Critical Care Clinical Reference Group. He is the Chair of the ongoing NHS England Neonatal Transformation Review. He took up his appointment at UCL following 11 years as Professor of Neonatal Medicine at Nottingham and 7 years as Senior Lecturer in Bristol. He is an Honorary Consultant in the University College Hospital Neonatal Service. Neil provided neonatal advice to the DH Working Groups that reported on Neonatal Services in 2002 and to the Toolkit for Quality Neonatal Services published in 2008. His major academic interests have been in long-term outcomes following prematurity and he is the Director of the MRC-funded EPICure studies (www.epicure.ac.uk). He runs a series of local studies into brain and cognitive development following very preterm birth and is a co-investigator on a range of mainly UK based cohort and randomised studies.
Neil has been President of the British Association for Perinatal Medicine, Director of the UCL Institute for Women’s Health, President of the European Society for Paediatric Research and Chair of two European Academy of Paediatric Societies Meetings. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and is an Honorary Life Friend of Bliss, the UK-based charity for premature babies. He has recently been appointed to the executive of the European Foundation for the Care of Newborn Infants.
Dr. Khorshid Mohammad is a Staff Neonatologist at Alberta Health Services, Calgary Zone, and a Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary.
Dr. Mohammad graduated in 2006 from the University of Damascus and Arab League with Master and Specialty degrees in Pediatrics. He completed neonatal fellowship training at the University of Calgary in 2010, Neonatal Neurology training at the University of British Columbia, and Targeted Neonatal Echocardiography at Universities of British Columbia and Calgary in 2013.
In 2014, Dr. Mohammad established the Neonatal Neuro-Critical Care program in Calgary in collaboration with Pediatric Neurology. Dr. Mohammad is a founding member of the Sonographic Clinical Assessment of the Newborn (SCAN) program. Dr. Mohammad’s main areas of interest are innovation in education and Quality Improvement. Dr. Mohammad established a neonatal brain monitoring simulation lab including cranial ultrasonography phantoms and simulators, Neonatal EEG simulator, Neonatal neurological exam using Virtual reality, and smart phones applications. He developed several teaching modules in Neonatal Neurology and organized several conferences, workshops, and courses in Neonatal Neuromonitoring.
Dr. Mohammad’s Quality Improvement work led to significant reduction in mortality and brain injury in extremely premature infants and term infants suffering from asphyxia and seizure. Dr. Mohammad’s areas of research interest are education, brain perfusion, monitoring, and Quality Improvement neuroprotection strategies.
Eleanor Molloy is Professor and Chair of Paediatrics, Trinity College Dublin, and a Consultant Neonatologist & Paediatrician at the Coombe Women and Infant’s University Hospital, the National Children’s Hospital, Tallaght, and Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin. Her research group aims to delineate perinatal and early neonatal inflammatory responses in health and disease. They have established longitudinal cohorts of infants with neonatal encephalopathy and preterm infants as well as neonatal controls in order to explore the role of early inflammatory changes and developmental outcomes.
Pierre Gressens MD PhD, received his Medical Degree in Brussels, Belgium in 1989 and his Ph.D. at the University of Louvain Medical School, Brussels in 1995. He further specialized in Child Neurology and carried out his post-doctoral research training with the renowned scientist Professor Phil G. Nelson at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. He has been working at Robert Debré Hospital, Paris both a researcher and child neurologist since 1995. Currently, he is the Director of the INSERM U676 – Diderot University research laboratory, Consultant in the Department of Child Neurology at Robert Debré Hospital at Paris, and Professor of Perinatal Neurology at Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College of London.
Betsy Pilon is the Executive Director of Hope for HIE, a global nonprofit dedicated to improving the quality of life for children and families through awareness, education and support for neonatal and pediatric acquired hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy. Hope for HIE serves over 6,000 families worldwide, through a comprehensive network.
After her own son, Max, was born in 2012 with HIE, she could not find any parent-focused resources on HIE. Eventually, she found a small group of families gathering on social media. Working with the existing group, she led the efforts to start the grassroots nonprofit foundation in 2013 to ensure no family faces HIE alone. As a result, Facebook recognized her in 2019 for building community with Hope for HIE.
She is passionate about neurodevelopment, early intervention, parent education, and building patient and family-centered care and partnerships. She advocates for improving communication among providers, patients, and families, positively impacting outcomes in healthcare and education.
With a career in marketing and communication spanning automotive, healthcare and education, she brings her community building skills to help grow the Newborn Brain Society serving on the Board of Directors and leading the Communication and Networking Committee.
Janet Soul is a pediatric neurologist who directs the Fetal-Neonatal Neurology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and is an Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Her research and clinical work are focused on Fetal and Neonatal Neurology. She obtained her undergraduate and medical degrees at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, then moved to Boston to complete her pediatric residency, Child Neurology training in the Harvard Longwood Neurology Program, and a Neonatal Neurology Fellowship under the mentorship of Drs Joseph Volpe and Adre du Plessis. The Fetal-Neonatal Neurology Program she leads provides specialized multidisciplinary care to fetuses, newborns and children whose neurologic disorders begin in utero or during the newborn period, and provides training for neurology, neonatology and pediatric fellows, residents and medical students. She conducts clinic research focused on the pathophysiology, treatment and outcome of neonatal seizures and brain injury related to hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy in term newborns, congenital heart disease, and preterm birth, and has published her original research in this field and written chapters in the major pediatric neurology textbooks and handbooks. She has been funded by the NIH, March of Dimes, Hood Foundation, United Cerebral Palsy Foundation, among others. She was the PI of a randomized, double-blind, controlled trial of bumetanide to treat neonatal seizures (NCT00830531), conducted at 4 hospitals in Boston, funded by an R01 from NINDS and other foundations. Dr. Soul is a member of the multicenter prospective neonatal seizure registry study and leads and participates in several major societies and committees, including Chair of the QI and Research Committee of the newly formed Newborn Brain Society.
Cally Tann is Consultant Neonatologist at UCLH specialising in neonatal neurocritical care and neurodevelopmental follow-up. Her clinical and research interests focus on newborn health and early childhood outcomes in low resource settings, in particular neonatal encephalopathy. She has lived and worked in Uganda on studies on risk factors for, and outcomes from, newborn brain injury and developing early intervention strategies for infants affected by developmental disability.
Sudhin Thayyil is head of the Weston group (Academic Neonatology) and Director of the Centre for Perinatal Neuroscience at Imperial College London, and holds an NIHR Advanced Research Fellowship. He was previously a senior clinical lecturer (NIHR Clinician Scientist) and consultant neonatologist at University College London, and was the lead for magnetic resonance biomarker group (2011 to 2013).
Marianne Thoresen MD PhD, Professor of Physiology, University of Oslo, Norway and Professor of Neonatal Neuroscience, University of Bristol and honorary consultant neonatologist, St Michaels Hospital, Bristol, UK.
In the early ninties, Marianne pioneered the laboratory research which showed that post-hypoxic cooling reduced brain injury in newborn pigs and rat pups. She had a key role in the CoolCap and TOBY randomised controlled trials which showed clinical benefit and in 2010 both NICE (UK) and ILCOR recommended therapeutic hypothermia (TH) for 3 days as a standard of care. In 2014, the TOBY trial showed the brain protection from TH continued until school age. After TH was recommended as standard of care Marianne works on implementing more effective and safer delivery of therapeutic hypothermia, in the UK and around the world. Currently she develops algorithms for outcome prediction using clinical and biochemical variables, amplitude integrated EEG and MRI guiding parents and staff on prognosis for groups as well as individual patients.
Sabine Van Huffel is a Professor of Engineering at the department of Electrical Engineering, KU Leuven, Belgium, where she is heading the Biomedical Data Processing Research Group.
Her research focus is the development of numerically reliable and robust algorithms for improving medical diagnostics in numerous areas such as epilepsy, stress and neonatal brain monitoring. In particular, she is well-known for her contributions to Total Least Squares (TLS) fitting and more recently for her expertise in matrix/tensor based biomedical multimodal and multichannel data processing combined with machine learning with applications in fusing ECG and EEG, EEG & functional MRI as well as multiparametric MRI.
Dr. Gabriel F. T. Variane graduated from Medical School at Faculdade de Ciencias Medicas da Santa Casa de Sao Paulo in 2009, completed his Pediatric training and neonatal fellowship at Santa Casa de Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2014. Prior to his current position, he was a visiting observer at Montreal Children’s Hospital, McGill University, Canada (2014), The Rosie Maternity Hospital, University of Cambridge, UK (2015) and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, Stanford University, US (2016). Dr. Variane is currently the medical director of Neonatal Neuro-Critical Care program at Santa Casa and staff neonatologist practicing in three different hospitals at Group Santa Joana, Sao Paulo.
In 2016, Dr. Variane started a nation-wide project and organization called Protecting Brains and Saving Futures (PBSF). The organization goal was to provide education and implementation of strategies of neuroprotection and brain monitoring on a large scale for babies at risk of brain injury. PBSF utilizes state of the art telemedicine and IT technology in collaboration with Microsoft including cloud computing and artificial intelligence systems to provide remote and real time assistance for 32 different hospitals across the entire country. Along with this educational effort, Dr. Variane has been directing a series of workshops and conferences in Brazil and other countries in Latin America to promote brain focused NICU care. His work at PBSF has been nominated and awarded several national and international recognitions.
Dr. Variane clinical and research focus on the use of neuroprotection strategies in LMIC. Recently he has been collaborating with Imperial College London, UK, in a multicenter study through NIH, in which a cloud EEG system was created to allow remote monitoring of infants from 3 different hospitals in India. His research also focuses the use of multimodality aEEG/EEG and NIRS monitoring using a cloud computing and machine learning technology to better understand the physiology and complex pathophysiology of brain activity and perfusion in infants at risk, collaborating in a multicenter study together with Neuro NICU team from Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, US.
Brian Walsh is a Consultant Neonatologist at Cork University Maternity Hospital. His research has focused on the neonatal brain with particular interests in neonatal encephalopathy, and the preterm brain’s development. His thesis, performed in CUMH focused on the early identification of neonatal encephalopathy and it’s severity, utilizing a combination of cord blood biomarkers and neurophysiological monitoring. Following this, Dr Walsh worked in Boston Children’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he focused on the use of qualitative and quantitative MR imaging techniques to study the newborn brain. His recent work has included studying the MRI injury associated with mild neonatal encephalopathy, while in preterm infants looking at the brain’s growth over the preterm period, and the association of certain medication exposure with altered brain volumes at term equivalent age.