Celebrate Pediatric Research

Professor, Chair Wake Forest Department of Pediatrics and Academic Chair for Advocate Health

Dr. Thompson, MD MS is the Weston M. Kelsey Professor of Pediatrics at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the Enterprise Academic Chair for Advocate Health. Her areas of interest for research, education, clinical care, and advocacy include comprehensive care for children, the social determinants of health that affect their families, adverse childhood experiences, effective delivery of primary care services, and the impact of new technology on the quality of healthcare. Her work with adolescent confidentiality in the electronic health record has prompted a long-term interest in medical ethics (in addition to her undergraduate degree in Biomedical Ethics) and ensuring that scientific knowledge reaches all. Dr. Thompson's mission, using team science and emphasizing peer and student engagement and mentorship, is to design, implement and deliver effective and equitable primary and subspecialty care across all of Advocate Health that improves the health outcomes of children and their families.

Assistant Professor, Pediatrics

Dr. Leila DeWitt is an Assistant Professor of Pediatric Hospital Medicine, Associate Program Director for the Pediatric Residency Program, and Associate Section Chief for Pediatric Hospital Medicine. Dr. DeWitt is a health services researcher with expertise in food insecurity experienced by pediatric patients and their families while admitted to the hospital, in addition to the consequences of inpatient food insecurity upon discharge home. She and her team organized an inpatient food pantry and caregiver meal tray program, and developed a novel screening tool to measure inpatient food insecurity for which she has published in JAMA Pediatrics. Dr. DeWitt attended Wake Forest University for undergraduate and graduate school, finishing with a Masters in Bioethics, proceeded to medical school in South Carolina, and returned to Wake Forest for pediatric residency training.

Professor, Pediatrics

Joseph "Joey" Skelton, MD, MS, is a Professor of Pediatrics at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He is the Founder and Director of Brenner FIT® (Families In Training), an interdisciplinary pediatric obesity treatment, prevention, research, and educational program. He serves as the Director of the Center for Prevention Science in Child and Family Health, Vice Chair of Research for the Department of Pediatrics, Associate Leader of Community and Stakeholder Engagement at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Childhood Obesity. He is board certified in Pediatrics and Obesity Medicine, with special interests in Culinary Medicine. He has secured nearly $10 million in funding over the past 15 years, has given over 50 national and international presentations, and has over 130 peer-reviewed publications. His wife Kristen is a critical care pharmacist, and he has two sons in college.

Professor, Pediatrics

Dr. Nageswaran is a pediatric palliative care physician, health services researcher, and Professor of Pediatrics. She holds joint appointments in the Departments of Social Sciences and Health Policy and Implementation Science. She has been with Wake Forest School of Medicine for 20 years. She directs the Pediatric Enhanced Care Program at Brenner Children’s Hospital, which provides complex and palliative care services. Her research focuses on improving health care delivery for medically fragile children and has been supported by NIH, HRSA, and various foundations. She currently leads a $4.4 million PCORI-funded project studying telehealth for medically complex children in primary care practices.

Assistant Professor, Social Sciences and Health Policy, Public Health Sciences, and Pediatrics

Dr. McGinnis is a clinical psychologist and research scientist and an Assistant Professor in the departments of Social Science and Health Policy in the Division of Public Health Sciences, with a secondary appointment in Pediatrics. Her work centers on childhood mental health and the development of digital tools to support pediatric populations. Her expertise includes longitudinal human subjects research, remote health monitoring using wearable sensors like Oura Rings and Apple Watches, and user-centered design-engaging key stakeholders to iteratively refine tools that meet the needs of both patients and health systems. Dr. McGinnis co-leads the M-Sense lab in the Center for Remote Health Monitoring, supported by a team of research scientists, study coordinators, graduate students, and undergraduates.

Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering

Dr. Jillian Urban is an Associate Professor in the Center for Injury Biomechanics at the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Her research integrates engineering and public health to develop evidence-based strategies for preventing and managing concussion and repetitive head impacts in sports, emphasizing community engagement. She leads an R01 project funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and has contributed as a co-investigator to studies supported by NIH, the Childress Institute for Pediatric Trauma, NASCAR, and Toyota Racing Development. With specialized training in injury biomechanics and public health, Dr. Urban has over a decade of experience collecting head acceleration and clinical data from athletes across various sports. She is deeply committed to involving the sports community in research to create and implement practical solutions to improve safety for athletes.

Professor, Pediatrics

Dr. Modave is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, and a member of the Center for Remote Health Monitoring and the Center for Healthcare Innovation. Previously, Dr. Modave served as Professor and Associate Chair for Research in the Department of Anesthesiology, and Assistant Dean for the Quality and Patient Safety initiative at the University of Florida. Dr. Modave holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Institute National Polytechnique de Toulouse, France. His research focuses on the development and implementation of digital health technology and artificial intelligence to improve clinical outcomes and reduce health inequities. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Dr. Modave is a native of Paris, France. In his free time, he enjoys good food, endurance sports, and spending time with his family, with 2 young children.

 

Professor, Cardiovascular Medicine

About:
He is a health informatics researcher with expertise in artificial intelligence and statistical modeling methodology and their applications in healthcare. He has formal training and expertise in domains including mathematics, statistics, operations research, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

His health informaticist areas of application include risk prediction, detection and monitoring of cardiovascular disease, adverse maternal events and movement disorders. He has extensive experience in integrating the artificial intelligence models with wearable devices that can remotely collect physiological waveform data, especially, electrocardiogram. His work has been funded by both federal agencies and private organizations such as Michael J Fox Foundation. He is the PI of two active R01 and one R21 as well as contributing co-I on many other federally funded research studies.

He is also an innovator and entrepreneur aiming to translate artificial intelligence models into Software as Medical Devices that can help improving health outcomes through clinical implementations. His efforts led to an FDA Breakthrough Designation for an artificial intelligence model that can track cardiac biomarkers, non-invasively and remotely via wearables.

Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence, Health Informatics, Remote Monitoring, Cardiovascular Disease ,Adverse Maternal Events, Software as Medical Device

Associate Professor, Biochemistry

About:
Dr. Gagnon earned a PhD in Biochemistry at NC State University and performed postdoctoral research at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas before starting his research group as an independent faculty member at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois in 2014. In 2023, Dr. Gagnon relocated his research laboratory to the Biochemistry department at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Research in the Gagnon lab is broadly focused on ribonucleic acid (RNA) in human biology, disease, and therapeutics. Improving the safety and efficacy of CRISPR-based gene therapy approaches, as well as developing new gene-targeted platforms for therapeutics, is a primary emphasis in the lab.

Other major areas of research include investigating fundamental mechanisms of RNA regulation in human cell biology, understanding the molecular basis of genetic forms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and uncovering novel therapeutic approaches for chronic HIV and HBV infections.

Research in the Gagnon lab incorporates a broad range of cutting-edge tools, including stem cell technologies, disease modeling, nucleic acid chemistry and therapeutics, next-generation sequencing, multi-omics, bioinformatics, and AI-guided laboratory evolution of nucleic acids and protein.

Research Interests: CRISPR-based therapeutics, Nucleic acid therapeutics, New gene therapy platforms, RNA biology in disease, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, (ALS) therapeutics, Genomics and transcriptomics for HIV, HBV, & SARS-CoV-2

Associate Professor, IM – Pulmonary

About:
Dr. Gibbs joined Wake Forest University School of Medicine in 2015.  He practices clinically as a medical intensivist at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.  Within, the Department of Internal Medicine/Section on Pulmonary, Critical Care, Allergy and Immunology, he serves as the Director of the Acute Care Clinical Trials Team. 

In this role, Dr. Gibbs leads conventional explanatory randomized clinical trials and pragmatic comparative effectiveness trials in hospitalized and critically ill patient.  His research focuses on two forms of respiratory life support: emergency tracheal intubation and mechanical ventilation with the goal of improving outcomes for the sickest patients in the hospital.

Research Interests: Critical Care, Mechanical Ventilation, Acute Respiratory Distress, Syndrome (ARDS), Pragmatic Trials, ICU Nutrition/Metabolism, Immune Mechanisms in Lung, Injury

Professor, PHS – Epidemiology and Prevention

About:
Dr. Jensen is a professor of epidemiology with specific expertise in reproductive, perinatal, pediatric epidemiology. Her research primarily focuses on etiologic factors in the development of pediatric, immune-mediated chronic disease. Dr. Jensen earned both her MPH and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in biomarker-based epidemiology. In addition to her appointment in Epidemiology and Prevention at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, she holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, and an adjunct appointment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Medicine.

Dr. Jensen has worked on numerous longitudinal cohort studies in maternal and pediatric populations, including analyses from the Mother-Child Cohort in Norway, the Collaborative Perinatal Project, the Extremely Low Gestational Age Newborns (ELGAN-ECHO) Study, and the longitudinal SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth Study.  Dr. Jensen currently leads several on-going cohort studies, including a study leveraging administrative databases and resources in Denmark to study in utero and early life environmental exposures in interaction with genotype in the development of eosinophilic esophagitis, an increasingly common, immune-mediated, allergic condition.   She also leads a study designed to characterize early life exposure to antibiotics through microspatial assessment of deciduous teeth in children, examining antibiotics in interaction for susceptibility genotype in development of eosinophilic esophagitis.  In an on-going RCT, she is evaluating remote blood pressure monitoring during the postpartum period to mitigate differential health outcomes due to hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. She also leads, as a clinical site PI, a study designed to elucidate factors associated with the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes in youth. Further, and in collaboration with the Department of OB/Gyn, she was recently awarded a grant to conduct an RCT designed to evaluate a novel model for providing postpartum education and support mothers and infants residing in outlying rural communities.

Research Interests: Infant, Gastrointestinal Diseases, Obesity, Diabetes Mellitus, Environmental Exposure, Autoimmune Diseases

Associate Professor, PHS – Biostatistics & Data Science

About:
Dr. Rigdon joined Wake Forest in 2019 after spending five years as a biostatistician in the Quantitative Sciences Unit at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research concerns collaborative biostatistics, causal inference, and preventive medicine.

Regarding collaborative biostatistics, he leads the Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design (BERD) group in the Wake Forest Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

Regarding causal inference, he has previously done research on randomization inference with and without interference, instrumental variables, and matching, and is currently the recipient of a PCORI award to further study a method for data-driven discovery of subgroups with heterogeneous treatment effects in clinical trials and observational studies.

Regarding preventive medicine, he has a longstanding interest in lifestyle interventions to improve health outcomes, including diet and exercise. He was previously the lead statistician for DIETFITS, a randomized clinical trial of low-carb and low-fat diets on weight loss. He is currently a co-investigator for MoTrPAC, a multicenter trial studying the effects of endurance and resistance exercise on the molecular mechanisms that improve health and prevent disease.

Research Interests: Models, Statistical, Data Interpretation, Statistical, Machine Learning, Treatment Outcome, Clinical Trials

Professor, Biomedical Engineering

About:
Her research uses medical image analysis and finite element modeling to study injury, with a particular focus on musculoskeletal health and fracture. Her research includes studies on high-energy trauma (e.g., automotive, spaceflight), as well as low-energy trauma (e.g., osteoporotic fracture). As PI, she is examining muscle-bone crosstalk in the Study of Muscle, Mobility and Aging, and spine injury risk in NASA spaceflight studies. She is leading musculoskeletal imaging assessments for several NIH-funded clinical trials to assess the effects of interventions to prevent bone and muscle loss with weight loss.

She uses multiple imaging modalities in her human subjects’ research, including computed tomography (CT), high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HRpQCT), MRI, and dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA). She co-directs several imaging cores including the Bioimaging Core of the Wake Pepper Center and the CT Core Lab for the Heartshare study.

She also co-directs recruiting for the biomedical engineering graduate program and undergraduate summer research programs in engineering and informatics.

Research Interests: Aging, Biomechanics, Injuries and Fractures, Musculoskeletal, Radiology / Imaging, Spaceflight, Traffic Accidents