The Incubator

Send us Fan Mail From lumbar punctures to mitochondrial recycling, this booth interview from PAS 2026 covers a lot of ground. Ben and Daphna sit down with Dr. Ioanna Kotsopoulou from Mass General to discuss two distinct but equally compelling topics. First, a quality improvement project that took ultrasound-guided LP use from 12 to 73 percent and first attempt success from 32 to 68 percent. Then a...

Send us Fan Mail What does it actually feel like to be told your 22-week baby has no chance — before anyone asks what you want? In this booth interview recorded live at PAS 2026, Ben and Daphna sit down with two NICU parents, Christelle and Reem, both of whom delivered at the limits of viability. They share candid, at times difficult accounts of prenatal counseling experiences where they felt dism...

Send us Fan Mail Point-of-care biomarkers for predicting sepsis mortality, not from a resource-rich academic center, but from a tertiary referral hospital in Tanzania. In this booth interview from PAS 2026, Ben and Daphna sit down with Dr. Abigail Sorensen, a pediatrician now based in East Africa, to discuss how a lasso model combining malnutrition, altered mental status, respiratory distress, and...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Jennifer Harling, pediatrician and neonatologist who spent six years practicing in Burundi, one of the poorest countries in the world, shares what it took to introduce breast milk fortification, bubble CPAP, and revised sepsis protocols in a setting with nurse-to-patient ratios as high as one to forty and near-zero access to medical supplies. She reflects on the extraordinary...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Ward Rice, neonatologist and researcher within the Neonatal Research Network, presents two-year follow-up data from the landmark ACT NOW Eat Sleep Console trial — one of the largest multi-center randomized trials ever conducted on neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome. He shares findings on neurodevelopmental and behavioral outcomes at two years of age in babies exposed to bupre...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Christa Matrone, neonatologist and program director at Winnie Palmer Hospital in Orlando, Florida, joins Ben and Daphna for a candid conversation about one of the most consequential announcements to hit neonatology training in years. She breaks down the American Board of Pediatrics proposal to create an optional two-year clinical training pathway for all pediatric subspecialti...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Allison Lure, neonatologist and clinical informatics fellow, presents findings from a large primary care network spanning over 80 practices in Massachusetts on how term and preterm infants grow longitudinally after discharge. She shares why the standard practice of correcting for gestational age until two years may be sufficient for moderate and late preterm infants but falls...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Parvesh Garg, neonatologist and researcher specializing in necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) and acute kidney injury (AKI) in preterm infants, shares more than a decade of work on two of the most understudied organ systems in the NICU. He explains why surgical NEC is an independent risk factor for long-term neurodevelopmental impairment, how aggressively managing hypotension at...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Wanda Barfield, MD, MPH, neonatologist at Emory University, former director of the Division of Reproductive Health at the CDC, and former Assistant Surgeon General of the United States Public Health Service, joins Ben and Daphna for a conversation about the broader obligations of pediatricians in an era of growing maternal and infant health disparities. She reflects on what it...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Seetha Shankaran one of the pioneers of therapeutic hypothermia for hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) and longtime member of the NICHD Neonatal Research Network, reflects on a career devoted to preventing and treating neonatal brain injury. She discusses what neonatal MRI can and cannot tell us about long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes in infants with HIE, why a normal M...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Ravi Patel, neonatologist and leading voice in neonatal hematology and transfusion medicine, joins Ben and Daphna to discuss the launch of NeoHeat — the first dedicated neonatal hematology and transfusion medicine group at PAS. He explains why transfusion medicine in neonatology is still full of unanswered questions, from how we manage iron supplementation to whether we are tr...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Charles Roehr, neonatologist from Bristol, UK and faculty member of the Tiny Baby Collaborative, makes the case that caring for extremely preterm infants is as much about engaging families as it is about mastering the medicine. He discusses why parents of tiny babies are among the most vulnerable to enter a research conversation — often facing precipitous deliveries with littl...

Send us Fan Mail Jennifer Canvasser, founder of the NEC Society and mother of Micah, a 27-weeker who passed away from necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) in 2014, shares what is new at the world's largest organization dedicated to NEC. She discusses the upcoming NEC Family Summit — the first of its kind globally — taking place in Davis, California this September, and explains why bringing familie...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Atul Malhotra, neonatologist and researcher at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, makes the case that cell therapy for neonatal brain injury is a slow burn that is finally gaining momentum. He shares why tempering expectations doesn't mean losing hope, how regulatory complexity sets stem cells apart from conventional therapies, and why cell therapy may look differ...

Send us Fan Mail Breaking news from the American Board of Pediatrics: a proposal to move all 15 pediatric subspecialties to a two-year, competency-based training model by July 2028 just dropped, and Ben and Daphna are breaking it down in real time. What does shifting from time-based to EPA-grounded training mean for neonatology fellows? Is two years actually enough? What happens to scholarship, re...

Send us Fan Mail The transfusion threshold consensus is here — but practice hasn't fully caught up. In the second episode of On with VON, Ben and Daphna sit down with Dr. Roger Soll and Dr. Ravi Patel to extend the conversation from the Vermont Oxford Network Grand Rounds on evidence to practice for transfusion thresholds. The core finding across trials is consistent: lower thresholds for bot...

Send us Fan Mail The AAP has weighed in on therapeutic hypothermia for HIE, and Daphna walks through the clinical report in full. The core eligibility criteria haven't moved — but the edges have gotten more nuanced. Late initiation, the 35-week zone, mild HIE, sentinel events, MRI timing, and feeding during cooling are all addressed. Also this week: a prospective pilot from Australia tests wh...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Neo News, Ben and Eli discuss a sobering Guttmacher Institute study recently featured in Bloomberg. Analyzing data from 2005 to 2023, the research reveals a troubling association between restrictive abortion laws and increased maternal mortality, specifically driven by cardiovascular complications and violent deaths. The hosts explore the clinical and social pat...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Ben reviews a secondary analysis of the CALI trial, published in JAMA Network Open, examining two-year neurodevelopmental and pulmonary outcomes in preterm infants who received early caffeine combined with LISA versus caffeine and CPAP alone. Building on the original CALI trial's finding that early caffeine prior to LISA reduced intubation rates...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Daphna presents the F-NeoBright trial — a pilot feasibility and safety study out of Hungary exploring intranasal fresh breast milk administration in neonates with moderate to severe HIE undergoing therapeutic hypothermia. With so few adjunct therapies available beyond cooling, the idea of harnessing breast milk's rich bioactive components — inclu...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Ben takes the lead and reviews a prospective cohort pilot study from the Archives of Disease in Childhood examining whether combining abdominal ultrasound with plain radiography can improve surgical risk stratification in neonates with suspected NEC. With mortality remaining as high as 20–40% and diagnosis still heavily reliant on clinical judgment, t...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Ben and Daphna dive into the American Academy of Pediatrics' February Clinical Report on Therapeutic Hypothermia for Neonatal Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy. Daphna, who presented this paper at the Florida Neonatal Neurologic Network, walks us through the key action statements — from the established 33.5°C target temperature to the more nuanced...

Send us Fan Mail In this Tech Tuesday episode, Ben sits down with Dr. Itamar Nitzan and Alon Meritrikin-Gold, the co-founders of SkinCubator, a revolutionary wearable incubator designed to transform neonatal skin-to-skin care. They discuss how reframing kangaroo care from a rare procedure to a continuous necessity inspired this paradigm-shifting device. The hosts dive into the clinical logistics,...

Send us Fan Mail In this interview episode, Ben and Daphna sit down with Professor Brett Manley to discuss a paradigm shift in neonatal research: adaptive platform trials. Frustrated by the inefficiencies and underpowered results of traditional RCTs, Dr. Manley outlines the ambitious Platypus Adaptive Platform Trial launching in Australia and New Zealand. They dive into how shared primary outcomes...

Send us Fan Mail This week on The Incubator Podcast, Ben and Daphna cover five topics spanning clinical practice, emerging technology, and neonatal policy. They open with a large Swedish national cohort study from JAMA Network Open examining early prophylactic hydrocortisone in extremely preterm infants, debating whether a blanket approach to BPD prevention holds up across gestational ages and in...