Presenters

Andrea Ciaranello | Primary Presenter

aciaranello@partners.org;
Dr. Ciaranello is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an infectious disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. She serves as director of the Perinatal Infectious Disease Program at MGH and Director of the Program in Health Economics and Modeling at the Harvard University Center for AIDS Research. She is also Co-Chair of the US Department of Health and Human Services Panel on Treatment of HIV in Pregnancy and Prevention of Perinatal Transmission and has served as technical consultant for UNAIDS and WHO about simulation modeling and cost-effectiveness related to pediatric HIV and vertical HIV transmission. Her research interests involve the use of simulation models to examine the long-term clinical outcomes and cost-effectiveness of strategies to care for women and children affected by infectious diseases.

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Elif Coskun | Co-Author

ecoskun1@mgh.harvard.edu;
Elif Coskun is a Research Specialist at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, focusing on pediatric infectious disease modeling. She received her Masters in Public Health focusing on biostatistics and epidemiology from Boston University and currently works on several modeling and cost-effectiveness analyses focusing on vertical transmission of infectious diseases.

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Malavika Prabhu | Co-Author

mprabhu@mgb.org;
Dr. Prabhu is an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology at HMS and a board-certified maternal-fetal medicine (MFM) specialist at MGH. Her research focuses on understanding how to decrease infectious disease-associated complications in pregnancy. She has conducted quality improvement research on optimizing the practice and delivery of obstetric care for chorioamnionitis, sepsis, CMV, and COVID-19, among others. She serves as the Vice Chair of the Publication Committee of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM), a position in which she oversees the development and publication of all clinical care guidelines from this leading US obstetrics society.

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Clare Flanagan | Co-Author

cflanagan2@partners.org;
Ms. Flanagan is a Project Manager/Scientist at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center. She has extensive expertise in the use of simulation models to inform maternal-child health policy. She also has more than a decade of experience in project management for clinical research, and a particular interest in the dissemination of scientific findings for a range of audiences.

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Megan Pesch | Co-Author

pesch@med.umich.edu;
Dr. Megan Pesch is a Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrician at the University of Michigan where she is the Director of the Congenital CMV Follow-up Clinic. Her research focuses on developmental outcomes of children with cCMV and the experiences of their families. She is the proud mother of three little girls, the youngest of whom is Deaf and has cCMV.

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Megan Nix | Co-Author

nix.megan@gmail.com;
Ms. Nix is the author of the book Remedies for Sorrow, an investigative memoir published by Doubleday about her second daughter who was born with congenital CMV. Megan was a National CMV Foundation Community Alliance Chair, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Romper, and elsewhere. Megan is a mother to five young children, and she divides her time between Colorado and a remote island in Alaska where her husband fishes for a living.

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Aaron Wu | Co-Author

aawu@mgh.harvard.edu;
Mr. Wu is a C/C++ and Python Software Programmer at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center. He has been leading the efforts to design, implement, and validate LINCS model of CMV in pregnancy. He has experience developing and maintaining microsimulation models of infectious diseases, and contributing to public health research using findings from modeling studies.

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Anne Neilan | Co-Author

aneilan@mgh.harvard.edu;
Dr. Neilan is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical school and a Faculty Member at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center. She is an Infectious Diseases Physician, board-certified in pediatrics, medicine, and adult infectious diseases. Her clinical and research focus is on care for adolescents and young adults affected by infectious diseases. She has led simulation modeling and cost-effectiveness analyses in both the US and internationally on HIV testing, treatment, prevention, and interventions to improve adherence to medications in adolescents and young adults.

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Caitlin Dugdale | Co-Author

cdugdale@mgh.harvard.edu;
Dr. Dugdale is an Infectious Disease Physician at MGH, an Assistant Professor of Medicine at HMS, and a Faculty Member at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center (MPEC). She has substantial expertise in modeling strategies to prevent vertical transmission of infectious diseases and improve maternal health, and she has published modeling analyses on a broad range of topics, including co-located maternal-child service delivery, the use of dolutegravir for people of childbearing potential, and the use of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) for infant postnatal HIV prophylaxis.

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John Giardina | Co-Author

jgiardina2@mgh.harvard.edu;
Dr. Giardina is a Faculty Decision Scientist/Biostatistician and Associate Investigator at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center. He is an expert in simulation modeling, cost-effectiveness analysis, and machine learning-based approaches to optimizing interpretation of both simulation model output and primary patient-level data. He previously worked on a highly-cited simulation model of COVID-19 in K-12 schools, and he has worked extensively in the development and validation of the LINCS CMV microsimulation model.

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Fatima Kakkar | Co-Author

fatima.kakkar@umontreal.ca;
Dr Fatima Kakkar is a pediatric infectious diseases specialist and clinician-researcher in congenital infections at Sainte-Justine University Health Center in Montreal, Canada, and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Montreal. She co-directs the Women and Children’s Infectious Diseases Center “Centre d’infectiologie mère-enfant”, which provides care for infants affected by congenital infections in pregnancy.