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Brian Vickery, MD, has been named Vice Chair of Clinical Research for the Emory School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics. In this role, he will advance the Department’s clinical research, foster collaboration and serve as a resource for other researchers. Dr. Vickery, who will continue in his roles as Division Chief of Allergy and Immunology and Director of the Food Allergy Program at Children’s, is a nationally recognized allergist and immunologist focused on developing evidence-based clinical therapies for food allergy and anaphylaxis. He brings extensive experience leading multicenter clinical research and advancing patient-centered outcomes in pediatric care.
Dr. Vickery joins the Vice Chairs and Director of Research—Ann Chahroudi, MD, PhD, Vice Chair of Basic Science Research; Stacy Heilman, PhD, Vice Chair of Research Operations; and Hanna Alemayehu, MD, Director for Pediatric Surgical Research. They work closely with Chief Research Officer and Executive Vice Chair of Research, Kristy Murray, DVM, PhD, to support the Emory and Children’s pediatric research enterprise.
Center for Clinical and Translational Research (CCTR)
Center for Cystic Fibrosis and Airways Disease Research (CF-AIR)
Children's Center for Immunity and Applied Genomics (CIAG)
Research and Epidemiology for Adolescent and Child Health (REACH) Center
‘Not Just Small Adults’: Children’s and Emory Researchers Build Specialized AI Models to Guide Clinical Decision Making for Clinicians Treating Kids
Dr. Satish Viswanath and Team Harness AI for Good, Developing Models to Unlock More Effective Treatments and Precision Medicine
There is no shortage of headlines about AI—many sensational, some scary—but researchers at Children’s and Emory know it can be used for good. Satish Viswanath, PhD, and other researchers in his lab are committed to building AI models that help children and the clinicians who serve them.
More specifically, they are focused on developing novel AI machine learning algorithms and computational imaging models to guide clinical decision making, helping clinicians make decisions about patient care and provide highly personalized, precision medicine.
“This offers a way to accurately identify patients at risk of suffering or experiencing complications,” he said. “We hope to more proactively identify these patients so we can better help them.”
Dr. Viswanath and his team anticipate it could also help people better understand the benefits of a particular treatment and boost confidence in outcomes. Recommendations are very personalized, based on a patient’s specific data.
Thanks to a $21.9 million grant from the late Bernie Marcus and The Marcus Foundation, Marcus Autism Center, a subsidiary of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, announced they will conduct the largest-ever study of behavior, brain and genomic biomarkers in children across the autism spectrum and associated genetic neurodevelopmental conditions to better understand what causes autism severity and elicits a treatment response in those with profound autism. The goal is to identify mechanisms that can be changed to optimize outcomes and generate new therapies. In a collaboration with Children’s Behavioral and Mental Health and Neurosciences Research Programs, Emory University School of Medicine’s Department of Human Genetics, and the Tri-Institutional Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS), 7,500 children from birth to 12-years of age will participate.
Marcus Autism Center
Congratulations to Karen E. Effinger, MD MS for receiving the ASPHO 2026 Childhood Cancer Survivorship Award for Excellence, funded by Northwestern Mutual. The Northwestern Mutual Award for Excellence in Childhood Cancer Survivorship annually recognizes outstanding contributions of practicing professionals dedicated to this segment of the pediatric hematology/oncology field. The award honors investigators dedicated to improving long-term health, well-being, and quality of life for pediatric cancer survivors. Please click here for more information.
Dr. Effinger is Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Kathelen V. Amos Chair for Cancer Survivorship, Emory University School of Medicine, and Co-Director of the Survivor Program, Aflac Cancer & Blood Disorders Center, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.
Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center (Aflac)
Research and Epidemiology for Adolescent and Child Health (REACH) Center
Congratulations to Stephen Patrick, MD, MPH, MS, FAAP for being named a 2026 Presidential Leadership Scholar. Dr. Patrick is part of the eleventh annual class comprised of 60 accomplished leaders includes educators, physicians, public servants, and corporate professionals.
The program began on January 21, 2026 in Washington, D.C. The class was selected after a rigorous application and review process, and Scholars were selected based on their leadership growth potential and their personal leadership projects aimed at addressing a problem or need in their community, the country, or the world. Over the course of several months, Scholars will travel to each participating presidential center to learn from former presidents, key former administration officials, business and civic leaders, and leading academics. They will study and put into practice varying leadership principles and exchange ideas to help maximize their impact in the communities they serve. Presidential Leadership Scholars brings together purpose-driven leaders from across the United States to collaborate and make a difference in our nation and world as they learn about leadership through the lens of the presidential experiences of George W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Please link here for more information.
Stephen Patrick, MD, MPH, MS, FAAP is the O. Wayne Rollins Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Health Policy and Management, Rollins School of Public Health; Professor of Pediatrics, Emory School of Medicine; and Neonatologist, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
Research and Epidemiology for Adolescent and Child Health (REACH) Center
The Emory Children's Center Vaccine Research Clinic received the Emory School of Medicine 2025 Team Excellence Award in Research/Science on December 10, 2025. In 2025, this team conducted 3,800 study visits for 670 participants across 22 research studies that span vaccine clinical trials and infectious disease epidemiology. The team is committed to advancing safe, effective, accessible vaccines and treatments to protect individuals from infectious diseases and to enhance health and wellbeing for all.
Center for Childhood Infections and Vaccines (CCIV)
Many of us hadn’t heard about coronavirus before March 2020—but that wasn’t the case for Vineet David Menachery, PhD. He remembers exactly where he was when he started hearing about a novel coronavirus circulating in China. It was New Year’s Eve 2019, and he was on a family vacation to India where he had promised his family he wouldn’t work or get online.
“I started getting texts and emails from people in the field, and I couldn’t ignore them,” he said. “It was 10 o’clock at night and I was sitting on the bed using Google Translate to read reports from China before we knew for sure it was coronavirus.”
For Dr. Menachery, those people ‘in the field’ were colleagues who, like him, study virology and immunology. Dr. Menachery had already spent more than a decade studying coronaviruses. This was before he joined the Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease at Emory as a researcher and started collaborating with Children’s as part of the Center for Childhood Infections and Vaccines (CCIV) in 2024, and before he was named one of the most influential researchers in the world by Clarivate in 2025." Back in 2020, he was working at the University of Texas Medical Branch in the Galveston National Lab. Before that, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill where he studied with Ralph Baric, PhD, a world leader in the study of coronaviruses.
“When we first started getting reports, we didn’t know exactly what kind of threat we were facing,” he said. “But by the end of the first week in January, we knew we had a new coronavirus. It started with a sinking worry in January and February, and then in March of 2020 everything hit.”
Dr. Menachery and his colleagues weren’t particularly surprised or caught off guard at first—we had already seen two coronavirus outbreaks in this century—but the scope of this outbreak continued to grow. “There was a lot of work on coronaviruses before 2020 because coronaviruses were not rare events and we knew something like the pandemic could happen,” he said. “We are constantly in situations where animals might have viruses that could infect us. The world is not getting any smaller. Infections like this are inevitable.”
Center for Childhood Infections and Vaccines (CCIV)
Biplab Dasgupta, PhD, MBA, professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine, has been named the inaugural Killian Owen Distinguished Professor for Pediatric Cancer. One of the institution’s highest honors, distinguished professorships recognize exceptional faculty achievement and provide an enduring investment in Emory’s academic and research community.
Recognized for his groundbreaking work in glioblastoma signaling and metabolism, Dasgupta is a co-leader of the Translational Cancer Metabolism Initiative and member of the Cell and Molecular Biology Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. He is also a faculty member with the Neuro-Oncology Program at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
The professorship is made possible through a $2 million commitment from Curing Kids Cancer named for Killian Owen, who passed away from acute lymphocytic leukemia at nine years old. His parents, Gráinne and Clay Owen, founded Curing Kids Cancer in 2005 to celebrate Killian’s life and improve outcomes for children with cancer. Matching support from Emory’s Faculty Eminence Initiative brings the total to $3 million.
“In Killian’s memory, Curing Kids Cancer is committed to funding innovative cancer research that saves lives,” says Gráinne Owen. “We are proud to support researchers like Dr. Dasgupta, whose discoveries offer hope to families facing pediatric cancer,” adds Clay Owen.
Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center (Aflac)
Center for Gastroenterology, Endocrinology, & Nutrition Innovation (GENI)
Children's Center for Neurosciences Research (CCNR)
Congratulations to the pediatric research alliance faculty and staff members who received awards at the Children’s + Emory Annual Faculty, Physician & Staff Awards Ceremony on November 19, 2025 at the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Support Building.
