Dr. Attarian focuses her academic work on neonatal nutrition and breastfeeding medicine. As an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant®, she is working to improve breast milk utilization rates, specifically mother's own milk, in the neonatal intensive care unit.

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Dr. Arnold's early contributions to science included studies to examine whether mathematic information in the pulse oximeter plethysmograph waveform can be used to measure pulsus paradoxus non-invasively and in real-time. If so, plethysmograph-estimate of pulsus paradoxus (PEP) will be a significant contribution to science and technology because it will provide clinicians an objective metric of acute exacerbation severity and response to treatment. He first studied healthy young adult participants who performed tidal-breathing through an airway circuit with adjustable inspiratory and expiratory resistance valves to generate pulsus paradoxus. PEP was calculated using a dedicated microprocessor and software program, based on change of plethysmograph waveform indices during the respiratory cycle. PEP predicted the degree of applied airway resistance. He has subsequently reported the validation of PEP using the criterion standards %-predicted FEV1 and airway resistance in the pulmonary function lab and in the emergency department with COPD and asthma. Assessment of acute asthma exacerbation severity directs treatment and the decision whether to hospitalize a patient, yet there are few objective measures to assess severity and predict outcome. His scientific contributions in this area have included work to improve assessment of acute exacerbations and to decrease variability of assessment between clinicians. These studies have examined the use of patient characteristics and clinical variables that are readily available at the bedside. He has demonstrated that select characteristics and variables can be used to accurately measure exacerbation severity and response to treatment with high inter-rater reliability. There are limited tools available to clinicians to inform hospitalization decisions for pediatric patients with acute asthma exacerbations. The scientific contributions of his team have included development and validation of the Asthma Prediction Rule (APR). This included development of both a comprehensive 15-variable and a reduced-form 5-variable prediction model for electronic decision-support. The APR might provide clinical decision-support to decrease unnecessary treatment variability, improve resource utilization, and improve patient outcomes measured using need-for-hospitalization criteria.

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Dr. Antoon is a NIH-funded clinical and health services researcher with a program focused on pharmacoepidemiology and medication safety in the pediatric population. As a physician-scientist, Dr. Antoon designs and conducts pragmatic clinical trials and population-based observational studies of medications, with a focus on the treatment of respiratory illness (e.g., pneumonia, influenza, COVID-19, RSV) in children. He evaluates the relationship between serious adverse events and medication exposures, as well as determining the role of drug-drug interactions and underlying infections in the development of serious adverse events in children. Dr. Antoon’s studies have investigated medication-related neurologic and psychiatric adverse events, severe cutaneous adverse reactions (e.g., Stevens Johnson Syndrome), cardiac events, and anaphylactic allergic reactions, among others.

Dr. Antoon is an expert on the safety and effectiveness of antivirals in the treatment of influenza and other respiratory viruses. He is the recipient of a NIH Career Development Award focused on determining the association between influenza, oseltamivir, and serious neuropsychiatric events, such as suicide or self-harm, encephalopathy, and psychosis.

Dr. Antoon has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in the fields of pediatrics, pharmacology, and drug safety. He is a member of the Society for Pediatric Research, the International Society for Influenza and Other Respiratory Virus Diseases, and the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology. Dr. Antoon was a 2021 recipient of the Young Investigator Award from the Academic Pediatric Association.

Dr. Antoon is a practicing pediatric hospitalist at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt. He is board certified in both General Pediatrics and Pediatric Hospital Medicine.

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Dr. Alrifai is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Informatics, a board-certified neonatologist in the Division of Neonatology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), and a board-certified clinical informatician in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. He holds a master's degree in applied clinical informatics. Dr. Alrifai is a VUMC HealthIT Clinical Director and the Medical Director for Inpatient Pediatric Informatics. He designed electronic health records clinical content for the VUMC neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and multiple NICUs in Tennessee. Dr. Alrifai's research focus is clinical decision support (CDS) for pediatric care, workload and patient acuity modeling, and clinical analytics. He designed and published clinical trials to evaluate health information technology systems in neonatal care and has ongoing trials in the evaluation of CDS tools.