The Incubator

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Jayasree Nair, neonatal resuscitation expert, joins Ben to reflect on one of the most humbling realities in neonatology — nearly everything we know about epinephrine use in extensive neonatal resuscitation comes from animal studies, adult data, or pediatric populations, not neonates. She explains why the pyramid of resuscitation research narrows dramatically as you move toward...

Send us Fan Mail Kimberly Novod, community health advocate, founder of Sol's Light, and fierce voice for health equity, joins Ben for a conversation about what it actually means to build trust between hospitals and the communities they serve. Drawing on her experience in New Orleans — where the prematurity rate sits at 14% and environmental factors like air, water, and soil quality in areas l...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Elisabeth Kuhn, researcher focused on hospital operations, presents findings from a mixed-methods study examining how US children's hospitals measure and respond to capacity strain — the point at which demand for care outpaces the ability to deliver it safely. In a survey of 45 tertiary children's hospitals, 43 reported experiencing capacity strain in the past year,...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Brandon Hadfield and Dr. Debora Abimana join Ben for a conversation that brings the incubator's global neonatology work full circle — from the founding of Rwanda's first neonatology fellowship program to seeing its first trainee present scholarly work at PAS. Dr. Abimana shares findings from her research on healthcare provider attitudes toward donor human milk in Rwa...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Zubair Aghai, neonatologist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, presents results from one of the largest neonatal trials ever conducted — enrolling 3,448 late preterm and term infants across India to test whether umbilical cord milking in non-vigorous newborns reduces death or moderate-to-severe HIE. With over 100,000 deliveries screened and real-time data collecte...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Melissa Zhou, researcher at the Developing Brain Institute at Children's National, joins Daphna to discuss functional MRI and what it reveals about how preterm brains are building connections during the NICU stay. Using functional connectivity — measuring how different brain regions communicate with each other over time — her team compares preterm infants to healthy in ut...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Ryan McAdams guest hosts alongside the NeoMind AI team — Dr. Ameena Husain, Dr. Kristyn Beam, Dr. Brynne Sullivan, and Dr. Zach Vesoulis — to recap their third annual pre-conference AI workshop at PAS, including a live predictive modeling bake-off using the Epic Cosmos database to predict late-onset sepsis in nearly 100,000 preterm infants. The group discusses where AI stands...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Gesca Borchardt, third-year neonatology fellow at Winnie Palmer Hospital, presents findings from a retrospective study of 296 infants born under 25 weeks examining whether extending empiric antibiotic use beyond 72 hours reduces mortality in this vulnerable population. She shares why her unit moved to a seven-day antibiotic course for babies with placental pathology positive f...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Kevin Cook, researcher at the Developing Brain Institute at Children's National, joins Daphna to discuss functional MRI and what it reveals about how preterm brains are building connections during the NICU stay. Using functional connectivity — measuring how different brain regions communicate with each other over time — his team compares preterm infants to healthy in uter...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Katie Ottolini, researcher at the Developing Brain Institute at Children's National in Washington DC, presents findings from a longitudinal MRI study comparing brain growth trajectories in preterm infants to healthy fetuses — scanning as early as 25 weeks and through term corrected age. Even in preterm babies with no significant brain injury and appropriate growth at birt...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. John Feister, neonatologist and health equity researcher at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, presents two studies that challenge us to look beyond the bedside. The first reveals that NICU babies whose families prefer a language other than English have nearly double the in-hospital mortality rate of English-speaking families — a difference that persisted even after adjustin...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Lori Devlin, neonatologist and principal investigator of the Optimize Now trial, shares results from the first multicenter randomized trial comparing symptom-based opioid dosing to scheduled opioid tapers in babies with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS). Published in JAMA on the day of this recording, the trial found that symptom-based dosing reduced medical readiness...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Ravi Jhaveri, infectious disease physician at Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago, joins Daphna for a conversation spanning two underappreciated threats in pediatrics. On hepatitis C, he shares that up to 90% of perinatally exposed infants never get tested despite clear guidance — and makes the case for point-of-care, heel-stick based testing that meets families where th...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Sharon Levy, director of the Division of Addiction Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital, joins Daphna for a wide-ranging conversation on adolescent substance use. She shares data showing a sudden spike in nicotine exposure among teens in treatment for substance use disorders — likely driven by larger vape devices and cooling agents that eliminate the burn sensation — an...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Jonathan Flyer, pediatric and fetal cardiologist at the University of Vermont, presents findings from a Vermont Oxford Network analysis of over 11,000 extremely low birth weight infants examining whether the method of patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) closure — transcatheter device versus surgical ligation — makes a difference for neurodevelopmental outcomes at 18 to 24 months. T...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Brandon Tucker and Dr. Jenelle Ferry share two studies tackling some of the most pressing challenges in the care of extremely low birth weight infants. Dr. Tucker presents a quality improvement initiative examining whether switching from PRN glycerin suppositories to scheduled glycerin enemas every 12 hours reduces feeding intolerance and spontaneous intestinal perforation in...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Christina Rojas, from Lurie Children's Hospital, presents findings from a multi-center study across eight hospitals examining how often hospitalized patients and families receive communication touchpoints from their care team — and whether that differs based on preferred language. Across more than 30 languages represented in the study, families who preferred a language ot...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. John James Parker, internist, pediatrician, and researcher at Northwestern University and Lurie Children's Hospital, joins Daphna and Rupa for a conversation about one of the most overlooked players in family-centered care — fathers. He shares why paternal stress in the NICU and postpartum period often peaks later than maternal stress, why discharge instructions routinely...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Lyubina Yankova, hospitalist at Yale, presents findings from a large retrospective multi-center analysis across 106 sites examining whether the combination of procalcitonin and C-reactive protein (CRP) can match or outperform the inflammatory marker combinations currently recommended by the 2021 AAP guidelines for risk-stratifying febrile infants between 8 and 60 days of age....

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Ayesha Khalid, resident at Marshall University, presents findings from a large meta-analysis pooling data from eight national registries across Europe — covering 2.5 million pregnancies — to examine whether prenatal acetaminophen exposure is truly linked to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children. She shares why the associ...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children's Hospital and member of the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biologic Products Advisory Committee, makes the case that vaccines must be tailored to the immune system of the person receiving them — and that immune system changes dramatically from the moment of birth through old age. He explains why pr...

Send us Fan Mail Daphna is back for day two of PAS 2026 in Boston, joined in the booth by Christa and Rupa. More episodes coming all day — and if you're at the conference, stop by and say hi. Support the show As always, feel free to send us questions, comments, or suggestions to our email: nicupodcast@gmail.com. You can also contact the show through Instagram or Twitter, @nicupodcast. Or cont...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Anup Katheria, one of the world's leading researchers in umbilical cord management, joins Daphna to share the latest data on deferred cord clamping and cord milking across gestational ages. He presents new two-year follow-up findings showing that while cord milking remains a reasonable alternative to immediate cord clamping, delayed cord clamping still carries a measurabl...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Bridget Young, researcher at the University of Rochester, shares early but promising work on using freeze-dried mother's own breast milk — including a skim milk fraction — as a fortifier for human milk feeds in the NICU. She explains why milk variability makes accuracy the central challenge in this approach, how her team validated a method using macronutrient analysis to...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Nathan Kupperman and Dr. Brett Bernstein, lead investigators on a landmark international pooled analysis published in JAMA, present the most comprehensive evidence to date on whether a lumbar puncture can be safely avoided in febrile infants under one month of age. Using a simple three-criteria rule — negative urinalysis, procalcitonin of 0.5 or below, and absolute neutrophil...