Scholars

Dr. Prasanna Ananth is a pediatric hematologist/oncologist. As a specialist caring for children with cancer and blood disorders, she says that helping children and families cope with serious illness provides inspiration for her patient care and research. Dr. Ananth is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (Hematology/Oncology). Her research focuses on evaluating and improving care for children with advanced cancer. Watch a video with Dr. Prasanna Ananth >>

Paul Aronson is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and of Emergency Medicine in the Section of Pediatric Emergency Medicine. His educational interests include teaching evidence-assisted medicine and engaging residents in scholarly activities, and he leads the Research Track for the residency program. His primary areas of research are the evaluation and management of the febrile young infant and shared decision-making with parents in the emergency department, and he is an investigator for several multicenter research networks. He enjoys any and all sports, focusing on Yale and Duke teams and the sports his son Eli and daughter Hayley play, particularly hockey and baseball. Mostly, he likes spending time with his wife and kids and exploring all that Connecticut has to offer.

Christine Bakhoum, MD, MAS is an Assistant Professor in the Section of Pediatric Nephrology at Yale University. Dr. Bakhoum grew up in Texas, where she graduated from Rice University and then obtained her medical degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch. She completed her residency training in Pediatrics at Northwell Health – Cohen Children’s Medical Center. She trained in pediatric nephrology at the University of California San Diego, where she also obtained her master’s degree in clinical research. She is a clinical investigator in the Clinical and Translational Research Accelerator (CTRA), and her research is focused on optimizing blood pressure measurement and management in children with kidney disease.

Clifford W. Bogue, MD, a pediatric critical care specialist, is the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor and Chairman of Pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine, where he has been on the faculty since 1993. He also serves as Chief of Pediatrics, Yale New Haven Health System. From 2014 to 2023 he served as the inaugural Chief Medical Officer of Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital, where he provided strategic and operational leadership for the Children’s Hospital’s clinical delivery systems. Dr. Bogue was named Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics in August, 2017. Dr. Bogue received both his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Virginia (UVA). He was a resident and chief resident in pediatrics at Vanderbilt University before completing a fellowship in pediatric critical care medicine at Yale. During his career at Yale, Dr. Bogue has held a number of medical school and hospital leadership positions, including Director of Pediatric Critical Care Transport, Medical Director of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, Director of the Pediatric Critical Care Fellowship, Chief of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine and Associate Chairman for Strategic Planning. From 2010-2012, he served as Interim Chairman of Pediatrics and Physician-in-Chief of Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital and from 2012-2015 served as Vice Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics. He served as Interim Chairman of Pediatrics from 2015-2017. Dr. Bogue has been actively involved in training students, residents, and fellows and is committed to the development of pediatric physician-scientists. He was director of Bedside to Bench: Seminars in Pediatrics, a course for first-year medical students for over ten years, served on the MD/PhD Faculty Committee, was PI for an NIH T32 training program in cardiopulmonary development for 10 years. He most recently served as training director for the Yale Child Health Research Center, a K12 program funded by the NICHD that had 25 years of consecutive funding. He has served on several NIH peer review panels and is currently a member of the Child Health Research Scientific Review Committee of the Charles H. Hood Foundation. He previously served as Co-Chair of the American Heart Association Genetics/Epigenetics peer review committee. In 2014, Dr. Bogue was the Chair of the Planning Committee for Pediatric Clinical Trials Network Stakeholders’ Forum, a forum convened by the American Academy of Pediatrics to initiate the process of developing a global pediatric clinical trials network. Dr. Bogue served on two NIH Advisory Committees of the NIH focused on the inclusion of children in research and in the Precision Medicine Program Initiative All of Us. Dr. Bogue’s academic career at Yale also included establishing and directing an NIH-funded research program in the developmental biology of the lung, liver, and cardiovascular system for over 20 years. During that time, his laboratory made important contributions to the genetic pathways involved in embryonic organ development, including the identification of genetic pathways critical to formation of the liver and biliary system as well as the cardiovascular system. Dr. Bogue has served on a number of national and international boards in academic pediatrics including the Council of the Society for Pediatric Research, the Federation of Pediatric Organizations’ Child Health Research and Training Workgroup, and the Program Committee of the Pediatric Academic Societies’ Meeting where he served as Chair from 2015-2017. He also served previously as a Trustee and President of the International Pediatric Research Foundation (which is responsible for publishing the journal Pediatric Research), Secretary-Treasurer of the American Pediatric Society, Chair of the AAP Committee on Pediatric Research, and Section Editor for Current Opinion in Pediatrics. He was elected President of the American Pediatric Society for the 2024-2025 term He has been named annually to Best Doctors in America since 2004 and was awarded both the Mae Gailani Young Investigator and Norman J Siegel Faculty Awards at the Yale School of Medicine and the Marna P. Borgstrom Lifetime Achievement Award from the Friends of Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Nina Brodsky is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Section of Critical Care Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. She received her M.D. from the University of Maryland, completed her Pediatric residency training at The Children's Hospital at Montefiore, and her Pediatric Critical Care fellowship at Yale New Haven Children's Hospital. Her research interests include the genetic and environmental etiologies of immunodeficiency and pathologic inflammation, as well as signaling and mechanisms of disease in patients with these conditions. Dr. Brodsky is particularly interested in human T cell developmental immunology and regulation of inflammation in health and disease. Her goal is to uncover and develop targeted translational therapies to improve immune responses during vaccination, infection, and immune-mediated diseases.

Caty Buck is a neonatologist and clinical researcher. She completed her pediatric training at UTSW Medical Center in Dallas, Texas and her Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine fellowship at Women and Infant's Hospital and Brown Medical School. Her research is focused on understanding how maternal metabolic health in pregnancy and the early newborn period influence infant growth, body composition, and neurodevelopment.

Dr. Ebbs is a Pediatric Critical Care Attending at Yale and Post-Doctoral researcher in the Cappello lab . He is affiliate faculty of the Institute for Global Health and Yale Uganda; he also serves on the Yale Global Health Council, is the Assistant Director for the Pediatrics Global Health Track, and is cofounder of the Yale Global Health On-TAP. He is cofounder of MGY (www.mgyaware.org), the Laro Kwo (saving lives) project in Northern Uganda, and the MGY team leader for clinical applications of projects. He has worked in Emergency Medical Services for over 20 years (flight paramedic) and continues to work in Emergency Medical Services in medical direction and training. Dr. Ebbs earned his M.S concentrating in Community Health at the University of New Mexico, finishing in 2013. His M.S. training focused on the role of community health workers in rural and developing regions around the world, specifically in West Borneo and the NE Peruvian Amazon. His research interests include community participatory research in global health and prehospital predictive modeling.

Julie Flom, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology in the division of Pediatric Pulmonology, Allergy, Immunology & Sleep Medicine and specializes in treating children with allergic disorders and immunodeficiencies. Dr. Flom earned her medical degree at the New York University School of Medicine and her MPH from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She completed her pediatric residency training and her allergy and immunology fellowship at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Flom’s clinical and research interests include understanding early life risk factors and underlying mechanisms for development of pediatric allergic diseases including food allergy, asthma, eczema, and environmental allergies, and applications to prevention and treatment of allergic disease.

Dr. Gaither is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (General Pediatrics) and Public Health (Chronic Disease Epidemiology). She obtained her doctorate in epidemiology from the Yale School of Public Health in 2015. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship in bioinformatics, she joined the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics. Her research focuses on the impact of the opioid crisis on vulnerable populations, work she began more than a decade ago as part of her dissertation research, for which she received a National Research Service Award from the NIH to study the association between opioid prescribing practices and all-cause mortality among U.S. veterans. In 2015, she began working on a project that allowed her to bridge her interests in adult medicine with that of pediatrics, which resulted in the first national publication to examine hospitalizations for opioid poisonings in children. She followed this work with the first national study to examine pediatric deaths from opioids. Prior to these publications, most of what was known about opioid-related morbidity and mortality came from the adult overdose literature. To date, she has published 56 papers in peer-reviewed journals and her research has been supported by awards from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Center for Advancing Translational Science, the Patterson Trust, the Hood Foundation, and most recently, the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Samuel Gentle, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Neonatology in the Department of Pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Gentle received his MD from The University of Alabama at Birmingham and completed residency at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, NY. He later completed a fellowship in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. His primary research interests are focused on identifying mechanisms that contribute to bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) in preterm infants and protective strategies that may reduce adverse pulmonary outcomes.

Dr. Greenberg grew up in New York, before attending Cornell University to study Biological Engineering. He then attended medical school at the State University of New York at Brooklyn. He completed his residency in Pediatrics at New York University Medical Center. Dr. Greenberg completed his fellowship in Pediatric Nephrology at the Yale University School of Medicine. He also obtained a Masters degree from Yale in Health Sciences Research . Dr. Greenberg is now an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Section of Nephrology at Yale University and a clinical investigator in the Clinical and Translational Research Accelerator (CTRA). His research focuses on improving risk prediction to assist with clinical decision making and inform clinical trials in children with kidney disease.

Abha R. Gupta obtained her BS in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University. She earned her MD and PhD (Neuroscience) degrees at the University of Pennsylvania. She completed a residency in general pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and a clinical fellowship in Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics at CHOP and Yale School of Medicine. Her clinical and research interests are in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially regressive conditions such as childhood disintegrative disorder (CDD). She obtained postdoctoral research training in the genetic investigation of ASD. As a principal investigator, she is pursuing both the genetics and neurobiology (stem cell modeling) of ASD.

Maria Christina Herrera, MD, MSHP is an assistant professor of pediatrics in the Sections of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and a faculty scholar at PolicyLab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Prior to her appointment at Yale, she was an attending physician in the Division of Adolescent Medicine at CHOP. She is currently funded by a National Institute on Drug Abuse K12 grant through Yale titled, Drug Use, Addiction and HIV prevention Research Scholars (DAHRS). Her present research focus addresses the intersection of the HIV and substance use epidemics for adolescents and young adults. She is particularly interested in optimizing access to HIV prevention initiatives for historically marginalized and disenfranchised young people with substance use. Dr. Herrera contributed to health care provision and public health efforts during her domestic training in Philadelphia, New York City, San Francisco, and with the Indian Health Service on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Whiteriver, Ariz. She has also worked both clinically and in a research capacity globally in the Dominican Republic, Peru and Mexico, all of which served to deepen her commitment to health equity and poverty alleviation. Originally from a small rural town in upstate New York, Dr. Herrera completed her undergraduate education with a Bachelor of Arts out of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Columbia University. She received her medical degree from Columbia University prior to completing her residency in the pediatrics PLUS program at the University of California, San Francisco, which trains pediatricians to advance health equity through community engagement and legislative advocacy. She then went on to complete her adolescent medicine fellowship at CHOP and graduated with a Master of Science in Health Policy from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kimberly Hieftje, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Yale Pediatrics and co-director/co-founder of XRPeds and the Yale Center for Immersive Technologies in Pediatrics, which focuses on the development and evaluation of videogame interventions using extended reality (virtual reality, augmented reality, etc) for health prevention and promotion, behavior change, and education in adolescents and young adults. She is currently involved in the development and testing of several health behavior change XR and game-based interventions and has published frequently on developing, evaluating, and implementing serious games. She has worked on games that have focused on topics including vaping/e-c-cigarette prevention, tobacco use prevention, risk reduction in adolescents, HIV/STI prevention, HIV/STI testing, empowering girls around healthy decision making, bystander intervention, LGBTQ bullying, school climate, and alcohol harm reduction. Dr. Hieftje was a K12 Scholar in the Yale Implementation Science program (YSIS), where she focused on understanding the factors associated with successful implementation of videogame interventions in schools. Dr. Hieftje is also the editor-in-chief at the Games for Health Journal.

Nadir Ijaz, M.D., completed his clinical training in General Pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at New York Presbyterian-Columbia University Medical Center. Dr. Ijaz earned his undergraduate degree in Chemistry and Biology from Duke University and his Doctor of Medicine degree from Stanford University School of Medicine, with a scholarly concentration in Health Services and Policy Research, as well as training in implementation science through the Training Institute for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health, Australia. In his early career, Dr. Ijaz led the first epidemiological study of pediatric emergencies in Pakistan and quality improvement projects related to hand hygiene and one-hour sepsis bundle implementation and was involved in mixed methods work investigating the barriers to and facilitators of patient-provider health policy discussions in primary care settings. During his pediatric critical care fellowship, he studied the effects of a community-based primary care intervention program on care-seeking behavior for childhood illness in Ghana. Dr. Ijaz's current research interests including the application of implementation science methods to essential emergency and critical care in resource-limited settings.

Tuba Kockar Kizilirmak is a graduate of the Istanbul University Faculty of Medicine. She completed her training in residency in pediatrics, and fellowship in pediatric pulmonology in Istanbul, Türkiye. Afterward, she relocated to the United States following her aspiration of becoming a physician-scientist. She served as a research specialist at the University of Arizona. She focused on epidemiologic studies of childhood asthma to identify early life determinants of childhood asthma by utilizing data from the Tucson Children's Study cohort. Currently, Dr. Kizilirmak is completing an additional pediatric pulmonary fellowship at Yale University, aiming to become a well-rounded physician-scientist. Her primary research interest focuses on airway inflammation in pediatric respiratory diseases, particularly in cystic fibrosis (CF). She has presented her work at both national and international conferences. During this fellowship, she was also selected for the Pediatric Scientist Development Program (PSDP) Research Fellowship. She has received multiple awards from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF), including first and second-year fellowship awards, the PSDP CFF fellow, and now the CFF fourth-year fellowship award. She has also been awarded an internal grant, the Yale Pediatric Scholar Award. Her long-term goal is to gain insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying airway inflammation in CF, which may lead to developing new therapeutic options. Dr. Kizilirmak is dedicated and passionate about providing the best possible care to children with respiratory diseases nationally and globally.

Dr. Konnikova's team focuses on the development of early life immunity particularly at barrier sites such as the GI tract and the maternal-fetal interface with a particular focus on T cell biology. Using multi-omic approaches, the group investigates how mucosal homeostasis is developed and what contributes to pathogenesis of diverse diseases such as sepsis, preterm labor, necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), very early onset (VEO) and pediatric IBD. The Konnikova lab is further interested in how the microbiome and the associated metabolome regulate immune development and homeostasis at barrier sites. Her group is also interested in how early life events alter circulating immune cells. To this end, in collaboration with the NOuRISH team they are enrolling infants in a longitudinal study of peripheral blood development.