The Incubator

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...

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...