Dr. Tolia is an attending neonatologist and director of research of the MEDNAX Medical Group Practice at Baylor Scott & White Health. He serves as the principle investigator for several national and local research studies, including projects on neonatal abstinence syndrome, inter-center variation in care, psychosocial stressors in NICU parents, and implementation of quality improvement initiatives. Dr. Tolia is also the research director of the DFW Neonatology Collaborative, a regional multidisciplinary quality improvement workgroup involving 10 hospitals, 5 health systems and 3 large neonatology practices which facilitates improvements in quality of care and outcomes for NICU babies. He is an assistant professor and faculty advisor at the Texas A&M Health Science Center-School of Medicine, where he is the course director for the NICU elective, and a core faculty member at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas.

Stephen W. Patrick, MD, MPH, MS, is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Health Policy at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and an attending neonatologist at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. Dr. Patrick is focused on improving public health systems to optimize maternal and child health. He is a health services researcher with a focus on Medicaid policy, eliminating healthcare-associated infections, substance-exposed infants and neonatal abstinence syndrome. He serves as Senior Science Policy Advisor to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. He also serves on the scientific advisory committee and is co-author of the improvement toolkit for an international effort to improve care delivered to infants with neonatal abstinence syndrome and their families through the Vermont Oxford Network. Dr. Patrick’s awards include the American Medical Association Foundation Excellence in Medicine Leadership Award and the Academic Pediatric Association Fellow Research Award. He is a graduate of the University of Florida, Florida State University College of Medicine, Harvard School of Public Health, University of Michigan and is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar.

I received my PhD in Statistics from Baylor University in Waco, TX in 2011. Since then I have been living in Dallas, TX and working as a biostatistician for Baylor Scott & White Health. I am involved in research in a variety of areas including surgery, trauma, rehabilitation, oncology, and neonatology. Areas of interest outside of work include watching sports and cooking. I also enjoy participating in group workouts and spending time with family and friends.

Dr. Brian Smith, MD MPH MHS is the chief of the Division of Quantitative Sciences and Professor of Pediatrics in the Department of Pediatrics at Duke University Medical Center and Associate Director of the Research Fellowship at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. He completed his residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in neonatology at Duke University Medical Center. He is areas of research interest include pediatric drug safety, neonatal pharmacology, and the epidemiology of neonatal infections. He has leadership roles in several large ongoing, multicenter studies evaluating the safety, dosing, and efficacy of drugs in children. He is a steering committee member of the NICHD-funded Pediatric Trials Network (PTN) which is tasked with evaluating the safety and dosing of off-patent drugs and devices in children under the BPCA.

Reese H. Clark, M.D., a clinical researcher for the care of critically ill newborns, is the Vice-President and Co-Director, The Center for Research, Education, and Quality, Pediatrix Medical Group. He is a Consulting Associate Professor at Duke University. He practices medicine at the NICU at Greenville Memorial Hospital in South Carolina, where he is a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at University of South Carolina School of Medicine, Greenville. A native of North Carolina, Dr. Clark earned both his Bachelor of Arts and medical degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed his pediatrics residency and his neonatal fellowship at Wilford Hall United States Air Forces Medical Center. He is a board-certified pediatrician and neonatologist.

Alan R. Spitzer, MD, joined Pediatrix Medical Group as Senior Vice President and Director of the Center for Research, Education, Quality, and Safety in 2004, following a long career in academic neonatal medicine. Dr. Spitzer graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1972 and did his residency at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. After completing his Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Fellowship at the University of California at San Francisco, he returned to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as a Staff Neonatologist. He joined Pediatrix Medical Group in July 2004, where he now oversees the programs in research, quality improvement, the Pediatrix website and several live educational programs. Between 2011-2014, Dr. Spitzer served as a member of the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in the Department of Health and Human Services, and he was appointed to the Subcommittee on Children’s Outcome Measures at AHRQ. In addition, Dr. Spitzer has been selected as a member of the Joint Commission Perinatal Care Technical Advisory Panel. Recently, he was named the recipient of the 2015 National Education Award from the Neonatal-Perinatal Section of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Dr. Spitzer has published extensively in the field of Neonatal Medicine, with more than 230 peer-review publications, book chapters, and editorials. He has had a special interest in the areas of neonatal lung diseases, neurological injury during the neonatal period, and infant apnea and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) throughout his career. Most recently, he has initiated studies that examine the proteomic evaluation of nutrition in the extremely low birth weight neonate, and outcomes and quality improvement in neonatal medicine. He has edited two textbooks, Intensive Care of the Fetus and Neonate, and Fetal and Neonatal Secrets (with Richard Polin, MD). The third edition of the latter book was published in October 2013.