Three faculty have joined the team of Associate Directors of the Safar Center related to their outstanding recent accomplishments relevant to the mission of the Center. Congratulations to all three faculty members!
Alicia K. Au, MD MS, Associate Professor of Critical Care Medicine (CCM) and Associate Medical Director of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, has been appointed Associate Director of Biomarkers. Dr. Au’s research and clinical interests have focused on the use of biomarkers of brain injury to predict neurological morbidity and outcome in patients across the entire pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). She was recently funded as MPI on an R01 targeting this important broadening of the potential application of blood-based biomarkers. She and her trainees have also contributed several important papers including a recent report on thresholds in ICP monitoring in infants and children and the importance of brain injury as a proximate cause of mortality in the PICU.
Christopher Horvat, MD, MHA, Assistant Professor of CCM, Director, Health Informatics for Clinical Effectiveness, Medical Director, Condition A/C Program, and Co-Director, Sepsis Performance Improvement Team at UPMC Children’s Hospital has been appointed Associate Director of Informatics. Dr. Horvat’s research and clinical interests are focused on process improvement and systems engineering, clinical informatics, precision sedation and analgesia, and point-of-care ultrasound. Chris played an important role on many of the recent key studies assessing various therapeutic approaches in the treatment of critically ill adults with COVID-19. He has served as a co-mentor of several of our recent highly successful T32 graduates and was also recently funded as MPI on the above-mentioned studies to develop a bio-digital rapid alert to identify neuro-morbidity in PICU patients.
Nahmah Kim-Campbell, MD, MS, Assistant Professor of CCM and Pediatrics, will serve as the Associate Director of Extracorporeal Support. Dr. Kim-Campbell’s research and clinical interests include translational investigation of the contribution of hemolysis and cell-free plasma hemoglobin to acute kidney and brain injury. She was recently awarded an R21 as MPI to develop a novel haptoglobin-based free hemoglobin absorption system to blunt this potential secondary injury mechanism in infants and children who are receiving extracorporeal support. She has recently published a series of papers on this injury mechanism in patients who have received cardiopulmonary bypass and is using a pre-clinical model to study other novel therapies to mitigate this injury pathway.