Leadership Council Bios
Karen Wilson, MD, MPH
Dr. Wilson is the Debra and Leon Black Division Chief of General Pediatrics, and the Vice-Chair for Clinical and Translational Research for the Department of Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She received her undergraduate degree in psychology from St. Lawrence University, and a Master’s in Public Health, and medical degree with Distinction in Research from the University of Rochester. She completed her Pediatric Residency and Academic General Pediatric fellowship also at the University of Rochester. Her primary research interests are in understanding the relationship between secondhand tobacco smoke exposure and severity of illness in children hospitalized for respiratory illness, and how to improve outcomes in hospitalized children. Dr. Wilson had an R01 from NCI to study an inpatient parent smoking cessation intervention, and she is one of the Principal Investigators and on the Speaker’s Bureau of the AAP/Julius B. Richmond Center of Excellence, which is dedicated to eliminating children’s exposure to tobacco and secondhand smoke. In addition, she is the Chair of the AAP Tobacco Consortium and the Associate Editor of the Nelson's Textbook of Pediatrics. Dr. Wilson is also the Chair Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings Network Executive Council, and Deputy Editor of Hospital Pediatrics.
Samir S. Shah, MD, MSCE
Dr. Shah is a Pediatric Hospital Medicine and Pediatric Infectious Diseases physician. He is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. He is also Director of the Division of Hospital Medicine and holds the James M. Ewell Endowed Chair at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.
Dr. Shah's research focuses on improving the efficiency of care for hospitalized children with a focus on common serious infections such as pneumonia and meningitis. He has received research support from numerous federal agencies and foundations, including the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Children's Hospital Association. Dr. Shah is Chair of the National Pneumonia Guidelines Committee, jointly sponsored by the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Hospital Medicine. In addition, he is editor or co-editor of 12 books in the fields of pediatrics and infectious diseases including The Philadelphia Guide: Inpatient Pediatrics (now in its 3rd edition), Pediatric Infectious Diseases: Essentials for Practice – a textbook for the pediatric generalist-, and Comprehensive Pediatric Hospital Medicine. Dr. Shah has received several prestigious research awards, including the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society Young Investigator Award, the Society of Hospital Medicine Excellence in Research Award, the Academic Pediatric Association Miller-Sarkin Mentoring Award, the Academic Pediatric Association Research Award, and, in 2019, the Society of Hospital Medicine Masters in Hospital Medicine lifetime achievement award.
Sanjay Mahant, MD, MSc, FRCPC
Dr. Mahant is a Staff Pediatrician in the Division of Paediatric Medicine, Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), Toronto and Assistant Professor, Department of Paediatrics, University of Toronto. He completed his medical degree at the University of Toronto and pediatric residency at SickKids. He received his MSc in health research methods at McMaster University, Canada and is a member of the Paediatric Outcomes Research Team (PORT) in the Division of Paediatric Medicine at SickKids. His clinical focus is primarily in the care of hospitalized children and children with complex chronic conditions. His research and scholarly interests have focused on (1) the study of families and children with chronic complex conditions and specifically around feeding interventions in neurologically impaired children (2) the study of common conditions (diagnosis, treatment, outcomes) seen on the inpatient unit including urinary tract infections and complicated pneumonia (3) and quality improvement and clinical excellence.
Christopher Bonafide, MD, MSCE
Dr. Bonafide is a pediatric hospitalist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves as Research Director for Pediatric Hospital Medicine at CHOP. His research focuses on the overarching goal of re-engineering the systems we use for physiologic monitoring in the hospital and home settings, with numerous projects focused on hospital monitoring overuse, alarm fatigue, and the implications of using consumer vital sign baby monitors at home. He has also developed expertise in the science of deimplementation. His research is actively funded by NIH, AHRQ, and NSF. In addition to his publications in journals such as JAMA, JAMA Pediatrics, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and Pediatrics, his work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
Patrick Brady, MD, MSc
Patrick Brady, MD, MSc is Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and an attending physician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. He is a hospital-based pediatrician, improvement scientist and health services researcher with a focus on designing and evaluating a highly reliable system to predict, identify, and intervene on hospitalized patients at risk of clinical deterioration. Specifically he uses situation awareness and other high-reliability strategies to leverage the expertise of patients, and families and front-line clinicians as well as big data to improve communication, shared understanding and the safety of care. He has completed fellowship training in clinical research and improvement science. In recent work, Dr. Brady and his team have developed, tested, and implemented standardized communication and huddles (short and structured briefings between nurses and physicians) to discuss high-risk patients. This has led to a significant and sustained reduction in unrecognized clinical deterioration and serious safety events among hospitalized children at our hospital. He has experience with quantitative methods using machine-learning methods to predict clinical deterioration and qualitative methods, including previous funded and published work where nurses, respiratory therapists, and resident physicians identified the enablers and barriers to situation awareness. With Dr. Chris Bonafide, he co-chairs the Pediatric Committee of the iSRRS. He has over 30 peer-reviewed publications. He has a K08 career development award from AHRQ which aims to understand how families of hospitalized children identify a worsening condition or illness and communicate their concerns to the healthcare team, and then to partner with families and clinicians to co-design and test communication tools to improve shared understanding and reduce medical errors.
Derek Williams, MD, MPH
Derek Williams, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. Dr. Williams is a clinical and health services researcher with an array of experience conducting multicenter cohort studies, clinical trials, and implementation research. His research program centers on improving care delivery and outcomes for children with pneumonia and other acute respiratory illnesses, and is supported by funding from CDC, NIH, and AHRQ. He has authored 90+ peer-reviewed publications, and he has received awards recognizing his scientific contributions from the Academic Pediatric Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America/Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Society of Hospital Medicine.
JoAnna Leyenaar, MD, PhD, MPH
A pediatrician and health services researcher, Dr. JoAnna Leyenaar's work is focused on improving the quality of healthcare provided to children, particularly those who are vulnerable and underserved. In her clinical role, Dr. Leyenaar works as a pediatric hospitalist and Vice Chair of Research for the Department of Pediatrics at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Dr. Leyenaar's main areas of research interest include: care coordination for children with chronic illnesses, urban-rural disparities in healthcare quality, hospital-to-home transitions, integration of mental and behavioral healthcare in pediatrics, and care of opioid-exposed infants. She is currently receiving funding from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of direct admission to hospital as an alternative to admission through emergency departments. In addition, she is funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to examine urban-rural disparities in healthcare access and outcomes for children with medical complexity. Dr. Leyenaar received her MD from McMaster University (Canada), her MPH from Harvard University, and her PhD from Tufts University.
Katherine Auger, MD, MSc
Dr. Auger is the Associate Chair for Outcomes at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and a member of the Division of Pediatric Hospital Medicine. Dr. Auger’s research focuses on understanding patterns in pediatric hospital utilization, in particular readmission. Her research is funded through a K08 award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. She completed fellowship training in pediatric hospital medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She also completed the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, which included completing a Master of Science degree in Health and Healthcare Research. She has more than 35 peer reviewed publications, including first authored works on identifying unplanned readmission and highlighting the work of the Seamless Transitions and (Re)admissions network. She serves an editorial board member of Pediatrics. She is the only pediatrician on the National Quality Forum’s All Cause Admission and Readmission standing expert committee. Dr. Auger has received several prestigious research awards including the Nemours child Health Services Research Award and the Pediatric Hospital Medicine Outstanding Research Award.
Sunitha Kaiser, MD, MSc
Dr. Kaiser is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics, and Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She completed her pediatric residency at UCSF, a fellowship in academic general pediatrics at the Hospital for Sick Children, and a Masters in Epidemiology and Health Care Research at the University of Toronto. Her research is focused on improving quality of care for hospitalized children by accelerating use of evidence-based guidelines in clinical practice. Her current work involves identifying, testing, and disseminating best practices for clinical pathway implementation. She is funded through the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Alisa Khan, MD, MPH
Dr. Khan is a pediatric hospitalist and health services researcher who studies interventions to improve family engagement in hospital communication and safety. Her work is based on the principle that patients, families, nurses, and physicians are equal members of the care team who can coproduce safer and higher quality care together. Dr. Khan graduated cum laude from Harvard College in 2005 and completed medical school in 2009 at the University of Michigan Medical School, where she was a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society. In 2012, she completed pediatrics residency at Johns Hopkins Children's Center, where she developed an interest in communication research. She proceeded to complete a joint pediatric health services research and academic pediatric hospital medicine fellowship at Boston Children's Hospital, concurrently receiving an MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2014.
Dr. Khan has led studies to improve family-centered rounds, family safety reporting, and patient safety. These include the PCORI-funded Patient and Family Centered I-PASS Study and the AHRQ-funded Family Activation and Communication About Errors and Safety (FACES Study), for which she currently serves as PI. She is also interested in healthcare disparities, specifically strategies to improve communication and safety in hospitalized patients and families with limited English proficiency. Her research has been published in the BMJ, JAMA Pediatrics, Pediatrics, and Academic Pediatrics. Dr. Khan has received funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Charles. H. Hood foundation, and other organizations.
Stephanie Doupnik, MD, MSHP
Stephanie Doupnik, MD, MSHP, is a Principal Investigator at PolicyLab and the Center for Pediatric Clinical Effectiveness at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on improving children’s mental health and wellbeing. She is particularly interested in integrating mental health services into general medical care for children. Her research has examined how to identify and support children with mental health conditions when they are hospitalized, how to reduce risk of suicide in young people, and how pediatricians and mental health specialists can collaborate effectively.
Dr. Doupnik completed an undergraduate degree in comparative literature at the University of Virginia, medical school at Drexel University, and pediatrics residency at Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center. She completed an Academic General Pediatrics fellowship at CHOP and a master’s degree in health policy research at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Cardinal Health Foundation, and the Academic Pediatric Association.
Amanda Schondelmeyer, MD, MSc
Dr. Schondelmeyer is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati and an attending physician in Hospital Medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She completed her undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She then went on to complete her pediatric residency and pediatric hospital medicine fellowship at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, completing a Master of Science in Clinical and Translational Research at the University of Cincinnati during her fellowship. Dr. Schondelmeyer’s research focuses on using quantitative, qualitative, and implementation science methods to evaluate and reduce overuse of non-evidence-based practices for hospitalized children. She has a particular interest in addressing alarm fatigue and the overuse of continuous cardiorespiratory and pulse oximetry monitoring in children’s hospitals. Her work has been funded through AHRQ, NHLBI, NIAID, the Cincinnati Children’s Research Foundation, and the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation Foundation. Dr. Schondelmeyer serves as an editorial board member for Hospital Pediatrics.
Eric Coon, MD, MS
Eric Coon is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Utah and an Associate Executive Council member for the PRIS Network. He is a national leader in pediatric high-value care research. He and his collaborators have examined the comparative effectiveness of common pediatric medical interventions including prolonged intravenous antibiotic therapy, high-flow nasal cannula, and post-hospitalization follow-up. Dr. Coon has also led pioneering work describing and identifying pediatric overdiagnosis, ushering in a novel field of pediatric research that fundamentally shifts the approach to diagnosis. Rather than simply asking whether or not a test will accurately identify an abnormality, an awareness for overdiagnosis necessitates asking the question of whether a child will receive more benefit than harm as a result of testing and diagnosis. Most recently, Dr. Coon served as a Co-Principal Investigator for the Bronchiolitis Follow-up Intervention Trial (BeneFIT). BeneFIT was a multicenter randomized trial conducted within two major healthcare systems (Intermountain Healthcare and Stanford University) and four hospitals, demonstrating that as-needed post-hospitalization follow-up is effective for children hospitalized with bronchiolitis. Dr. Coon is keen to conduct more randomized controlled trials to answer pressing questions in pediatric hospital medicine.
Mike Tchou, MD
Dr. Tchou is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Section of Pediatric Hospital Medicine at Children’s Hospital Colorado and the University of Colorado-Anschutz Medical Campus. He completed a Pediatric Hospital Medicine research fellowship at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and a Master of Science in Clinical and Translational Research degree at the University of Cincinnati. He has also completed training in improvement science as a Quality Scholar through the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence and a research fellowship at the Adult and Child Consortium for Health Outcomes and Research and Delivery Science at the University of Colorado-Denver. He is currently a PEDSnet Scholar. Dr. Tchou has an interest in studying the topic of high-value care, i.e. the ways we can improve the quality of healthcare while maintaining or reducing overall health systems costs. He is a current His current research is focused on understanding the overuse of medical resources related to diagnostic testing and identifying best practices and conceptual frameworks for value improvement projects. He is also interested in better understanding how best to tap into the potentials of social media to help both aspiring and established researchers learn, find support, develop proposals, and publicize research results in his role as Digital Media Director for PRIS.
Lilliam Ambroggio, PhD
Lilliam Ambroggio, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Sections of Emergency Medicine and Hospital Medicine at the University of Colorado and the Children’s Hospital Colorado. Her research program focuses on improving outcomes for children with common, serious infections by developing methods to improve diagnostic accuracy, implementing these methods into clinical practice and improving the overall management of children with these infections across acute care settings. Previous studies have focused on antibiotic resistance, empiric antibiotic choice, using -omics technology to develop more accurate diagnostics, and imaging modality in managing pneumonia in children. She is also the Director of Research for the Section of Hospital Medicine and the Associate Director of Research for the Section of Emergency Medicine. These roles allow her the opportunity to mentor trainees at all levels and junior faculty in a wide variety of fields from firearm injury in the ED to transcriptomics of ventilator associated pneumonia for critically ill children.
Michelle M. Kelly, MD, MSc
Dr. Kelly is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, Wisconsin. She leads a health services research program focusing on developing tools and technology that enhance health information transparency with the goal of improving family engagement, care quality and patient safety. Her research program has been funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and National Institutes of Health. Her teams’ findings have been disseminated in multiple high-impact journals and featured by the Children’s Hospital Association and in the Washington Post. She currently serves as the Deputy Editor for Pediatrics Open Science, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ inaugural open access journal.
Kavita Parikh, MD, MSHS
Kavita Parikh is a Board-certified Pediatrician, Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the George Washington University and Children’s National Health System in Washington DC. She is committed to developing a career as an independent researcher in patient-centered outcomes research, and is currently funded through a career training award (K08) through the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality.
Her academic career has focused on using health services research methodologies to understand pediatric respiratory diseases, and she has several publications in leading pediatric journals using these methodologies. She has published articles in Pediatrics, JAMA Pediatrics, and Journal of Pediatrics among others, and has given national presentations and led national workshops. Dr. Parikh was awarded a Young Investigator Award from the Academic Pediatric Association for a project focusing on the impact of national practice guidelines on the management of bronchiolitis.
She has a national presence in the pediatric hospitalist community, and served as an educational liaison for the Section of Hospital Medicine Executive Committee to promote hospitalist faculty at the National Conference and Exhibition (NCE) of the AAP, and now is a member of the planning committee for the NCE, a distinct honor in the AAP. She serves on the editorial board of Hospital Pediatrics, as well as the steering committee for the Value in Inpatient Pediatrics (VIP) Network. She was also elected to the prestigious Society of Pediatric Research.
Dr. Parikh completed her undergraduate education at Brown University, medical education at Cornell University Medical College, and clinical residency training at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She completed her Hospitalist Fellowship at Children’s National Health System in Washington DC, and completed her Master’s degree in Clinical and Translational Research from George Washington University.
Joanna Thomson, MD, MPH
Joanna Thomson, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Hospital Medicine a at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC). She completed a four-year combined Hospital Medicine and NRSA General Academic Pediatrics Research fellowship. With a passion for caring for and improving the health outcomes of children with medical complexity, Dr. Thomson’s clinical effort includes time with the inpatient complex care team at Cincinnati Children’s. Her research focuses on identification, implementation, and dissemination of best management practices for hospitalized children with neurologic impairment. Dr. Thomson is currently partnering with PRIS Network sites in the execution of her AHRQ K08 award. In this project, she seeks to identify management practices (e.g., airway clearance strategies) associated with better hospital outcomes and to then develop and implement care recommendations for the hospital management of acute respiratory infections in children with NI. Recommendations for hospital management of acute respiratory infections in children with NI will allow for standardization of care and optimization of patient outcomes. Such standardization for otherwise healthy children has resulted in decreased unwarranted testing and therapies while improving patient outcomes and decreasing cost of care.
Raj Srivastava, MD, FRCP(C), MPH
Raj Srivastava, MD, FRCP(C), MPH, is the Senior Medical Executive Director of Intermountain’s Healthcare Delivery Institute (HDI), a center for education, implementation science, and quality improvement. Within the HDI Dr. Srivastava leads Intermountain Healthcare’s implementation science core as a Professor of Research. The Implementation science core is responsible for the evaluation of evidence-based implementation of clinical best practices within the specialty- and community-based care pillars within Intermountain, including both adult and pediatric care. Dr. Srivastava also oversees the Advanced Training Program in Clinical Quality Improvement, an in-depth course designed for healthcare professionals who need to teach, implement, and investigate quality improvement, outcome measurement, and management of clinical processes.
Dr. Srivastava co-directs the Stanford-Intermountain Population Health Fellowship Program, which takes advantage of the two institutions’ synergies in research, system implementation design, and strong desire to deploy effective, evidence-based interventions in both healthcare systems.
Dr. Srivastava is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Utah in the Division of Pediatric Hospital Medicine and is a practicing hospitalist at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. Dr. Srivastava is also a former Chair of the Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings (PRIS) network.
Christopher Landrigan, MD, MPH
Christopher P. Landrigan, MD, MPH is the Chief of General Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, Director of the Sleep and Patient Safety Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the William Berenberg Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He was a founding member of the Harvard Work Hours, Health, and Safety Group, the founding chair of the Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings (PRIS) Network, a founder and Principal Investigator of the I-PASS Study Group, and a founder of the I-PASS Patient Safety Institute.
Dr. Landrigan has led a series of groundbreaking studies on the epidemiology of medical errors, and interventions designed to reduce their incidence. His most important work has been focused on developing reliable patient safety measurement tools, and developing and implementing interventions to improve the safety of hospital care. His work on the relationship between resident work hours, sleep, and patient safety contributed to national changes in resident work hour standards. More recently, he led the development of I-PASS, a multi-faceted handoff and communication improvement program that AHRQ has described as the gold standard for safe handoffs of care; adapting it for use by physicians, nurses, and other providers in a wide range of healthcare settings; and implementing it. I-PASS has been adopted by pediatric and adult hospitals across the country.
Dr. Landrigan has authored over 150 publications in the medical literature, and has received numerous awards for his research, teaching, leadership, and innovation. The I-PASS Study Group was the recipient in 2016 of the most prestigious patient safety award in the country, the John M. Eisenberg Award for National Achievement in Patient Safety, from the Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum.
Matt Hall, PhD
Matt has performed pediatrics health services and policy research for over 10 years at CHA. He leads CHA’s Statistical Division and oversees 15 physician-led multicenter research groups that use CHA’s data assets for clinical, operational, and financial improvement by hospitals and policy makers. Matt is the Director of CHA’s Health Services Research Academy, an online training program for people who want to learn how to do health services research. He is a Statistical Editor at the Journal of Hospital Medicine.
Chris Russell
Member of EC, Children’s Hospital of Los Angels,
Research Director, Division of Hospital Medicine, Attending Physician,
Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, Keck School of Medicine of USC,
crussell@chla.usc.edu