Collaborators

John completed his pediatric intensive care training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. He is the Director of Child Health – Surgery, Cardiac and Critical Care, the Clinical Director of the PICU, and the Clinical Director of the ECMO programme at Starship Children’s Hospital in New Zealand. He also leads the PICU Research Programme at Starship Children’s Hospital. His research centers on acute brain injury, brain development, and neurodevelopment in children with congenital heart disease, traumatic brain injury, and hypoxic ischemic brain injury. He is the Principal Investigator of the Hearts & Minds Study and Hearts & Minds At School, a multi-site prospective longitudinal study of neurological and neurodevelopmental outcomes in children with congenital heart disease. He was also the Principal Investigator for the Hypothermia in Traumatic Brain Injury in Children Study and the co-Principal Investigator for the CoolKids Study.

Ali is director of the Intelligent Medical Imaging research group at the Computational Radiology Laboratory, and the Director of Translational Research in the Radiology Department at Boston Children’s Hospital. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering at the University of Tehran. He then earned a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas. With long-term research interests in signal and image processing and intelligent systems, he has turned his focus to machine learning and medical imaging in the past decade, where he has developed new techniques and tools for brain functional localization, motion and distortion correction in MRI, image registration and segmentation, robust super-resolution volume reconstruction, and motion-robust diffusion-weighted MRI. He is the receipent of awards from the Thrasher Research Fund, the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center, the McKnight Foundation, Fetal Health Foundation, and the Office of Faculty Development at Boston Children’s Hospital (Eleanor and Miles Shore Fellowship); and is currently leading projects on motion-robust diffusion-weighted MRI of early brain development, motion-robust imaging technology for quantitative analysis of early brain growth, and quantitative imaging for improved prenatal prognosis of pulmonary hypoplasia.

Clare O’Hare is a graduate of Saint Louis University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO. After earning her medical degree, she moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to complete residency training in general pediatrics at Children’s Wisconsin. She then returned to St. Louis to complete her fellowship training in pediatric cardiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis/St. Louis Children’s Hospital, followed by an advanced fellowship in pediatric cardiac imaging with a focus on fetal echocardiography. She recently moved to Cleveland, Ohio where she is now associate staff at Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital, practicing pediatric cardiology.

Caitlin received her medical degree from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research lies at the intersection of neurology and cardiology, aiming to illuminate the neurobiological underpinnings of neurodevelopmental impairment in congenital heart disease. She has collaborated with investigators in neurology, cardiology, and radiology to evaluate the MRI findings in adolescents with transposition of the great arteries. She is currently Principal Investigator of a fetal MRI study that investigates fetal brain measurements in congenital heart disease to determine whether in utero markers of abnormal brain development can be identified. The ultimate goal of the study is to establish neurobiological targets for fetal neuroprotective intervention and identify those patients most likely to benefit from such therapy. Her clinical work as a neurologist with the Cardiac Neurodevelopmental Neurology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital informs her research and supports her dedication to bring the benefits of research to children.

Chris is the Director of the Neonatal Neurology Clinical Program at Washington University/St. Louis Children’s Hospital, where he is an Associate Professor of Neurology, Pediatrics and Radiology. He also co-directs the Baker Family Fellowship in Neonatal Neurology and Cardiac Neurodevelopmental Follow-Up Clinic at Washington University. He is a pediatric neurologist with additional training in neonatal neurology.

With a strong background in biomedical engineering, Dr. Smyser’s research focuses on the use of advanced neuroimaging techniques to provide greater understanding of early brain development and the pathway to neurodevelopmental disabilities. He is co-director of the Washington University Neonatal Developmental Research (WUNDER) Laboratory with his colleague Dr. Cynthia Rogers. Dr. Smyser’s recent research efforts have centered upon the use of resting state-functional connectivity MRI and diffusion MRI to investigate functional and structural brain development in high-risk pediatric populations from infancy through adolescence. He is currently the principal investigator for multiple NIH-funded longitudinal studies focused upon defining the deleterious effects of prematurity, brain injury and environmental exposures on neurodevelopmental and psychiatric outcomes through development and application of state-of-the-art neuroimaging approaches. He has numerous related publications in the fields of neonatal and pediatric neurology.