Hermione Lyall is a consultant in paediatric infectious diseases at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and honorary senior lecturer at Imperial College. She is interested in congenital infections and their prevention, particularly HIV and CMV. She runs both HIV and other congenital infection clinics at St Mary’s Hospital in London, and is ward-attending consultant for Paediatric Infectious Diseases 4 months per year.
She is a member of PENTA-ID and participates in HIV treatment trials for children. In 2018, she joined the board of the European Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseases (ESPID). At the 2018 ESPID meeting, she received the “Bill Marshall” award; her chosen lecture topic was “Lessons from HIV- Can we eradicate congenital Cytomegalovirus infection?” She has been actively involved in the development of international courses for education for Paediatric Infections for many years (hermione.lyall@nhs.net).
Sudhin Thayyil completed his PhD at University College London in 2010 and was as a Senior Clinical Lecturer and honorary consultant in Neonatal Medicine at University College London between 2010 and 2013. He moved to Imperial College London in 2014 to establish the Centre for Perinatal Neuroscience and was appointed as a Professor of Perinatal Neuroscience in 2020.
His work is mostly funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), UK, and includes an NIHR Clinician Scientist award and NIHR advanced fellowship for developing new treatments for hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy. He leads one of the largest clinical research programs in hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy in the world and has established a large South Asian consortium for conducting early and late phase clinical trials of neuroprotectants in hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy using continuous EEG monitoring, omics analysis, harmonised magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy and neurodevelopmental outcome assessments. He is the principal investigator for the MARBLE (Magnetic Resonance Biomarkers in Neonatal Encephalopathy, Lancet Neurology 2019) study; HELIX (hypothermia for encephalopathy in low- and middle-income countries, Lancet GH 2022) trial; Heart Beat (Heart Beat Variability in Neonatal Encephalopathy, NCT03179553) study; GENIE (Genomic Imaging in Neonatal Encephalopathy) study; PREVENT (Prevention of Epilepsy by Reducing Neonatal Encephalopathy, NCT04054453) study, EMBRACE (Erythropoietin for Neonatal Encephalopathy in LMIC, NCT05395195) trial; EDEN (Darbepoetin in Neonatal Encephalopathy, NCT04432662) trial and the COMET (Cooling in Mild Encephalopathy Versus Targeted Normothermia; NCT05889507) trial. He is passionate about research capacity building in LMIC and developing early career researchers, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Dr. Seetha Shankaran was the Chief of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at the Wayne State University School of Medicine, in Detroit for 26 years. She continues as Professor of Pediatrics at Wayne and has now joined the University of Texas in Austin, in the role of faculty development. Dr. Shankaran’s research focus is understanding etiology, risk, management, and the prevention of brain injury. She was principal Investigator (PI) of the first whole-body hypothermia trial in 2005 demonstrating decreases in death and disability following moderate or severe hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) performed by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Neonatal Research Network. She was also PI of the NRN trials demonstrating cooling for 72 hours at 33.5C is safer than longer or deeper cooling 2014 and 2017. Dr. Shankaran is currently the Co-PI of a trial of hypothermia for mild HIE in the UK. She is also involved in global research examining neuroprotection in low- and middle-income countries. In 2021, she was awarded the Landmark Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics and a photograph of an infant who underwent cooling and Dr. Shankaran is on the NICHD Director’s Hallway as the most significant NICHD Neonatal Network contribution in 25 years.
Professor Nikki Robertson trained in neonatal medicine in Melbourne and London after completing her medical training at the University of Edinburgh. Her interest in perinatal brain injury was kindled at the Hammersmith Hospital, London in the late 1990s, a time of exponential increase in our understanding of the evolution of brain injury after birth asphyxia. Since 2003 at UCL, Professor Robertson has used pre-clinical models to assess the safety and efficacy of additional therapies that can complement and synergize with therapeutic hypothermia, eq melatonin and human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells. She has worked with collaborators in Ghana and Uganda to optimize therapies for neonatal encephalopathy. In 2020, Professor Robertson took up a secondary appointment at the University of Edinburgh as Professor in Perinatal Neuroscience and is now leading her laboratory research at both UCL and Edinburgh.
Professor Dr. Manon Benders is director of the Departement neonatology of the Wilhelmina Children’s hospital of the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She was working as a senior clinical lecturer, King’s college London and honary consultant in Neonatology at Guy’s and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust in 2014. During her training she did a junior research fellowship at UCLA in 1997, USA and a neonatal neurology fellowship at University of Geneva (Prof. dr. P.S. Hüppi) in 2006-2007. Her research focus is on brain development and neonatal brain injury using advanced quantification MRI techniques predicting neurodevelopmental outcome and developing neuroprotective/neuroregenerative strategies from bench-to-bedside. In this research field she is supervising several PhD students and clinical research fellows, working in different national and international research projects, as well in clinical as experimental studies.
Dr Peter Reynolds is a very experienced senior Consultant Paediatrician, who specialises in the care of babies and young infants.
He is fully registered with the GMC, and has a Consultant NHS appointment at St. Peter's Hospital in Surrey and is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway University of London.
Dr. Reynolds is considered an expert in his field, and is regularly invited to lecture and teach.
He won the UK "Best Neonatal Specialist" category in the Who Cares Wins awards in 2018, which was presented to him by the then Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Theresa May MP.
Dr Amish Jain completed his medical education in India, pediatric residency in the UK and neonatal clinical fellowship in the University of Toronto before joining Mount Sinai Hospital as Staff Neonatologist in 2011; where he works as a staff neonatologist and clinician scientist at the Sinai Health System/Tanenbaum-Lunenfeld Research Institute and as an Assistant Professor in Pediatrics at the University of Toronto. He is also the site Director of the Targeted Neonatal Echocardiography Program in the NICU at Mount Sinai Hospital, which he co-founded in the year 2011. During this time Dr. Jain also completed a PhD in Cardiovascular Physiology under the Department of Physiology at University of Toronto.
Dr. Jain's specific research interests are in the field of critical care, neonatal cardiopulmonary physiology and functional echocardiography, particularly in the assessment and management of pulmonary hypertension and right ventricular function in neonates. Dr. Jain currently holds the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) and SickKids Foundation's (SKF) New Investigator Research Grant for the study of chronic pulmonary hypertension in preterm neonates as well as an Investigator Initiated Research Grant from Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals for establishing a Canadian national database for preterm neonates exposed to inhaled nitric oxide during NICU stay. Over the last 6 years, Dr. Jain has established himself as a content expert, independent researcher and an emerging leader of national and international prominence in the field of neonatal cardio-pulmonary physiology.