The Incubator

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Kyle Willsey, pediatric critical care transport director at Cedars-Sinai, joins Daphna to discuss one of the least standardized corners of pediatric and neonatal medicine — critical care transport. With children's hospitals closing across the country and tertiary centers absorbing more of the patient load, the demand for safe, well-trained transport teams is growing at th...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. David Sas, pediatric nephrologist at Mayo Clinic, joins Ben to discuss primary hyperoxaluria type 1 — a rare but devastating genetic disease where the liver overproduces oxalate, flooding the kidneys with crystals and leading to end-stage kidney failure in roughly 60% of patients, historically requiring both a liver and kidney transplant. He presents 60-month long-term extensi...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Lily Lou joins Daphna and Rupa to reflect on this year's Silverman Lecture at PAS — the annual honorary lecture of the AAP Section on Neonatal Perinatal Medicine — delivered by Dr. John Ioannidis of Boston, who turned the lens of research methodology back on the research community itself. Drawing on meta-analyses of meta-analyses, he offered ten provocations about how neo...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Emily Wassmer, researcher at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, presents findings from one of the first studies to examine gaming addiction in young children ages 5 to 12 with ADHD diagnoses. Using a newly developed caregiver-report screening tool based on DSM-5 criteria for internet gaming disorder, she found that inattention — more than hyperactivity, anxiety, depress...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Satyan Lakshminrusimha, pediatric chair and neonatologist, joins Ben hot off the ONTPD meeting to share his perspective on the ABP fellowship reform debate — and it's more nuanced than a simple yes or no to a two-year fellowship. He argues that the real problem is a six-year training pipeline that is driving medical students away from pediatric subspecialties under crushi...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Matthew Saxonhouse, neonatologist at Atrium Health, joins Ben to discuss two initiatives designed to fill the gaps that traditional conferences often leave behind. The first is Neonatal Insights, a biennial meeting returning January 29-31, 2027 in Houston — both in person and virtual — where controversial topics like the new hypoglycemia guidelines, cord blood transfusions, op...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Nathan Sundgren, neonatologist and NRP educator at Texas Children's Hospital, joins Ben to discuss one of the most deceptively difficult skills in neonatal resuscitation — effective bag mask ventilation. He shares findings from a fellowship training study showing that respiratory function monitor feedback improves ventilation technique equally well across all three device...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Mitchell Goldstein, neonatologist at Loma Linda University and editor-in-chief of Neonatology Today, joins Ben to share the story behind one of neonatology's most accessible and wide-reaching publications — a peer-reviewed, open-access journal with 25,000 monthly readers worldwide, no publication fees, no page limits, and no color charges. He explains the philosophy behin...

Send us Fan Mail Christie Lawrence, clinical nurse specialist at Rush University Medical Center, joins Ben to discuss sudden unexpected infant death (SUID) — the updated term that encompasses all sleep-related infant deaths, including what was formerly called SIDS. In Cook County alone, an infant dies every week from SUID, with Black infants dying at 14 times the rate of white infants — a disparit...

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...