Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute received funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to support the new Pediatric Acute Care Research (PACeR) training program. This will be the only T32 research training program nationally in pediatric emergency medicine and the only one that introduces research training across the continuum of acute care, rather than focus solely on emergency or critical care.
The PACeR training program will address the critical shortage of acute care pediatrician-scientists and the small number of research training opportunities in pediatric emergency and critical care medicine. The PACeR curriculum will be tailored to provide essential knowledge and skills specific to developing a research career in these settings. What sets the PACeR program apart is that it will bring together trainees from different pediatric acute care specialties under a single, multidisciplinary umbrella, rather than have distinct training programs for emergency medicine, critical care, or organ system-specific investigators. The PACeR program will provide postdoctoral scholars with mentored, experiential research opportunities, didactics, seminars, apprenticeships, and other career development experiences, with a focus on respiratory conditions, acute cardiovascular dysfunction, and resuscitation—the chief pathways to morbidity and mortality in children and key focus areas in the mission of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
“We believe that this will continue to position Lurie Children’s and Manne Research Institute as national leaders in pediatric acute and critical care research, filling a crucial need to train investigators who will rigorously and collaboratively generate, disseminate, and implement new knowledge to improve the health outcomes of acutely ill and injured children and their families,” says PACeR training program co-director Todd Florin, MD, MSCE, Associate Division Head for Academic Affairs and Research in the Division of Emergency Medicine at Lurie Children’s and Associate Chair for Research in the Department of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. The PACeR program will function as a major educational initiative in collaboration with the newly developed Center for Pediatric Acute and Critical Care Research and Innovation at Manne Research Institute.
The other co-director of the PACeR program is Bria Coates, MD, Attending Physician in Critical Care Medicine and the Crown Family Research Scholar in Developmental Biology at Lurie Children’s. The associate directors are Kenneth Michelson, MD, MPH, Research Director of Lurie Children’s Emergency Department; L. Nelson Sanchez-Pinto, MD, MBI, Attending Physician in Critical Care and the Warren and Eloise Batts Research Scholar at Lurie Children’s; and Elizabeth Alpern, MD, MSCE, Division Head of Emergency Medicine and Vice Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Lurie Children’s. Michelle L. Macy, MD, MS, Director of the Mary Ann & J. Milburn Smith Child Health Outcomes, Research and Evaluation Center at Manne Research Institute, will lead the evaluation of the training program with support from Smith Child Health Catalyst at Manne Research Institute. Dr. Macy holds the Mary Ann and J. Milburn Smith Research Professorship for the Director of Child Health Research at Lurie Children’s.
Pediatric research at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago is conducted through Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute.
