Critical Care and Hospital Medicine

The Division of Critical Care and Hospital Medicine provides exemplary, evidence-based, multidisciplinary critical care to the most medically vulnerable children in the greater New York City area and beyond. We do this in a setting that is distinct for its cutting-edge extramurally supported research and its commitment to providing the most comprehensive training available to the next generation of leaders in pediatric critical care and hospital medicine.

Since 2020, the division has included sections of Hospital Medicine and Palliative Care Medicine and the Center for Host-Pathogen Interactions in addition to Critical Care Medicine. These integrated groups work seamlessly to both care for the sickest and most vulnerable patients seen at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and to lead cutting-edge basic and translational research.

The Division of Critical Care and Hospital Medicine provides exemplary, evidence-based, multidisciplinary critical care to the most medically vulnerable children in the greater New York City area and beyond. We do this in a setting that is distinct for its cutting-edge extramurally supported research and its commitment to providing the most comprehensive training available to the next generation of leaders in pediatric critical care and hospital medicine. 

Since 2020, the division has included sections of Hospital Medicine and Palliative Care Medicine and the Center for Host-Pathogen Interactions in addition to Critical Care Medicine. These integrated groups work seamlessly to both care for the sickest and most vulnerable patients seen at New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and to lead cutting-edge basic and translational research. 

New programs, people, initiatives, research in 2024: 

• Dr. Matteo Porotto and Dr. Anne Moscona of Center for Host Pathogen Interactions and Critical Care Medicine Section published a paper in the journal Science titled “A neutralizing antibody prevents postfusion transition of measles virus fusion protein.” Working with a multidisciplinary group of scientists, they identified the cryo–electron microscopy structures of the measles virus fusion protein in complex with a monoclonal antibody and assessed its therapeutic potential against measles viral infection. This discovery is important as there are no approved therapeutics for measles virus, which presents.  
• Dr. Kathrine Nash’s work published in the journal JAMA investigated whether the hospitals achieve equitable readmission rates. Her work revealed that only ~1 in 5 eligible hospitals had equitable readmissions by insurance, ~1 in 3 had equitable readmissions by race. Achieving equitable readmissions did not consistently correlate with quality, cost, or value, suggesting that equity-focused outcome measures assess new dimensions of hospital performance distinct from traditional accountability measures. 
• Dr. Sviatlana Samovich’s work identified specific phospholipids that contain polyunsaturated oxidation prone fatty acids in their structure as initiators of ferroptosis in a paper published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. Ferroptosis is a regulated cell death program that has been discovered at Columbia University in 2012 by Dr. Stockwell’s lab and has been intensely studied. Unique to ferroptosis among other programmed death pathways is oxidation of membrane phospholipids. Once thought to be having only structural roles, signaling roles of phospholipids have been emerging.  
• The Division Faculty obtained new extramural grants as principal investigators including a large multicenter U19 award and an R56 award from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to investigate vaccines and therapies to Respiro, Rubula, Peribunya, Phenuiviridae and Measles; an R01 and R03 from National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to study mechanisms of cardiac dysfunction in Barth syndrome and host immunity in the lung during infection, respectively;  and a grant from Stony Wold-Herbert Fund to study mechanisms of repair after lung injury.  
• Health Equity Rounds were initiated by the PICU fellows Dr. Elorm Awakame and Dr. Tom Kuriakose under the mentorship of Dr. Nash, Dr. Aponte-Patel and Dr. Pryce first at the divisional level then at the departmental level. 
• Renovation of Children’s Redox Health Center is completed in the fall of 2024. The center contains state-of-the-art instrumentation including a timsTOF fleX MALDI-2 mass spectrometer with abilities to perform identification, characterization and quantification of metabolites, lipids and oxidized lipids as well as spatially map their location at 5 micron spatial resolution. Combined with peptide barcoded antibodies, this will allow the investigators to identify specific cell types and proteins involved in metabolism of phospholipids and other metabolites improving therapeutic targeting.   
• Dr. Anne Moscona served as the president of American Society of Virology, one of the word’s leading organizations in the field. As president she organized the Society’s 2024 Annual Meeting, which drew 2,000 attendees in June 2024.  

New Appointments  

• Fahmida Islam, MD, MS
  • Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at CUMC 
• Carlos Plancarte, MD
  • Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at CUMC 
• Komal Kasbati, MD
  • Assistant Professor (NYP Westchester Hospital)
• Elizabeth Fischman, MD
  • Instructor
• Sandy Zhang, MD
  • Instructor
• Margaret Gaughran, DO
  • Assistant Professor (NYP Westchester Hospital)

Promotions 

• Linda Aponte-Patel, MD
  • Named vice chair for justice, equity, and diversity in the Department of Pediatrics and tasked with leading the newly established Office for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) 
• Andrew Geneslaw, MD
  • PCCM Program Director 
• Bennett Weinerman, MD
  • Assistant Program Director for PCCM 
• Patrice Pryce, MD
  • Assistant Program Director for PCCM 
• Aqsa Durrani, MD
  • Elected into the Board of Directors of Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders- USA 
• Divya Lakhaney, MD
  • Section Chief of Pediatric Hospital Medicine 
• Mirna Giordano, MD
  • Medical Director of the Progressive Care Unit (PCU) 
• Drs. Sarah Schechter, Benjamin Hooe, Rebecca Carlin, Katie Nash, Rebekah Diamond
  • Passed their PHM boards, making the PHM faculty 100% board certified in pediatric hospital medicine.  

Honors/Awards 

• Katherine Nash, MD 
  • 2024 Department of Pediatrics “Best Research Paper of the Year, Early Investigator” Award – “Measuring Equity in Readmission as an assessment of hospital performance,” Columba University Medical Center 
  • Recipient of the 2024 Academic Pediatric Association Young Investigator Award 
• Rebecca Hough, MD  
  • Elected to Society for Pediatric Research 
• Taylor Sewell, MD, MBA 
  • Vanneck-Bailey Scholar: Virginia Apgar Academy of Medical Educators, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (VP&S). Received the single annual award from the VP&S Virginia Academy of Medical Educators: “The Vanneck-Bailey Award is given annually to support a VP&S faculty member to develop educational programs that will ‘ensure that VP&S students are among the finest physicians entering the profession, skilled in the knowledge and practice of medicine and modeling compassionate, humanistic care to all patients.’” Award prize of $40,000 to support implementation of my proposal Enhancing the LGBTQ+ Curriculum at VP&S 
  • Member, Editorial Leadership Board: Selected to be on the Editorial Leadership board of PubMed-indexed Journal of Patient Experience 
  • Member, Advisory Board of NYC/Westchester Chapter of Society of Hospital Medicine: Selected by Chapter President to join Advisory Board of local chapter 
• Taylor Sewell, MD, MBA, and Kasia Stoj, MD  
  • Third place winners in the Society of Hospital Medicine poster competition, for their presentation, "Caught Red-Handed (and Footed): A Case of PPGSS 
• Sumeet Banker, MD 
  • Joined the editorial board for Hospital Pediatrics, a journal through the AAP that is the main journal in the field of PHM 
• Thomas Connors, MD 
  • Research Publication Award – Early Career Professor; Columbia University Department of Pediatrics 
  • Awarded by the Department to a faculty member deemed to have publication with high impact in the field of pediatrics. 
• Mirna Giordano, MD  
  • 2024 Physician of the Year Award Recipient  
  • Recognized as a National Hospital Medicine Mentor by the Society of Hospital Medicine 
  • Invited as a faculty member to the AAP Emerging Leaders Conference 
  • Nominated for the Chair of Pediatric Hospital Medicine Subboard at the Americal Board of Pediatrics Innovation and Nucleation Clinical Research Grant 15,000. 
• Priyanka Mehrotra, MD 
  • Acceptance to the 2024-25 Children’s Mercy Bioethics Center Certificate Program in Pediatric Bioethics 
• Palliative Care team 
  • Honored as "Service of the Year" by the Division of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology/BMT for "superior contributions to patients and trainees." 
• Cristina Alcorta, MD  
  • Named one of JEDI’s PDIC Fellow Liaisons  
  • All- Star Award by 9 Tower 
• Hülya Bayir, MD, Matteo Porotto, PhD, Anne Moscona, MD  
  • Recognized as top funded researchers in the $1million and over category by the Dept. of Pediatrics 
• Joshua Motelow, MD  
  • Recognized as top funded researchers in the $250K and over category by the Dept. of Pediatrics 
• Hülya Bayir, MD  
  • Recognized as one of Clarivate's Highly Cited Researchers 
• Kasia Stoj, MD  
  • Rising star award by Columbia University Academy of clinical excellence (ACE) 
• Anne Moscona, MD  
  • Outstanding Service Award, American Society for Microbiology (Extraordinary contributions and performance as mBio Editor)  
  • Served as the Chair of American Society of Virology and organized the Society’s 2024 Annual meeting