William Oh, MD

William Oh is truly one of the founders of the field of neonatal medicine and has taught us much of what we know of metabolism, minerals, and fluids and electrolytes in the newborn infant. Originally trained in the Phillipines, where he received his MD degree, he came to the United States in 1958, doing a pediatric residency at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. He subsequently became Chief Resident and a research fellow in neonatology at that institution.

Between 1964 and 1966, he initiated a series of research projects at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm that resulted in one of the first series of papers to examine neonatal blood pressure, neonatal blood volume, neonatal hemodynamics, and neonatal renal function.

He became Director of Neonatology at Michael Reese in 1966, subsequently joining the faculty as Chief of Neonatology at Harbor General Hospital in California from 1969-1974. In 1975, he left California and migrated to the East Coast, becoming Pediatrician-in-Chief of Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island and Professor of Pediatrics and Obstetrics at Brown University, where he later was appointed Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics in 1989. During this highly productive part of his career, Dr. Oh published virtually non-stop in a number of areas of neonatal medicine.

He continued his efforts at understanding neonatal blood pressure, the role of acid-base balance upon abnormal fetal heart rate patterns and neonatal well-being, the effects of insensible water loss upon neonatal metabolism, nutritional well-being in neonates, neonatal glucose metabolism, intrauterine growth retardation, neonatal renal function, bilirubin toxicity, and many others.

Increasingly, he has become interested in long-term neurodevelopmental outcome following NICU hospitalization and has been a leading figure in the NICHD Neonatal Network. He has won numerous major awards and honors, including the Apgar Award of the AAP. Dr. Oh has long been focused on one of the key areas of modern medicine, namely improving outcomes for neonates, and has contributed as much as any living neonatologist in that regard. Dr. William Oh remains active on the faculty of Brown University to this day and is truly a Legend of Neonatology.

Abraham M. Rudolph, MD

It has been said of Dr. Abraham Rudolph that he is responsible for much of what we know about congenital heart disease. Born in South Africa, he went to medical school at the University of Witwatersrand, winning most of the prizes awarded in his graduating class, where he graduated summa cum laude. He did his initial training at Transvaal Memorial Hospital for Children, but subsequently spent a year in the United Kingdom.

After briefly returning to South Africa, he decided to move to the United States and studied with the great cardiologist, Alexander Nadas, at Boston Children’s Hospital. There he initiated a number of classical studies in pediatric cardiology involving digitalis in infants and children, pulmonary stenosis, atrial septal defect, aortic stenosis, PDA, VSD, tetralogy of Fallot, and transposition of the great vessels. Much of the knowledge gained from this research led to the publication of his famous textbook entitled Congenital Diseases of the Heart: Clinical-Physiological Considerations, which first appeared in 1974 and then was revised in 2001 and 2009.

Dr. Rudolph was also one of the first individuals to recognize and study pulmonary hypertension and the effects of a variety of agents on the pulmonary circulation. He originated many of the techniques of pediatric cardiac catheterization during the 1950’s, and was the first person to catheterize the premature infant, demonstrating the PDA in babies with hyaline membrane disease. In the 1960’s, Dr. Rudolph moved to Einstein College of Medicine, where with Michael Heymann, he began a series of groundbreaking studies on the pulmonary circulation and the fetal circulation, utilizing injected microspheres for the first time to measure flow to various organs in animal preparations.

In 1966, Dr. Rudolph migrated West to the University of California at San Francisco and the Cardiovascular Research Institute, refining the use of microspheres to measure changes in fetal circulatory development. He also initiated his classic studies in the ductus arteriosus, and together with Dr. Henry Edmunds, was responsible for the first successful ductal ligation in a pre-term infant.

He is widely renowned for his extensive experimental studies of developmental and postnatal physiology and pathophysiology. In addition, he has been a member of the National Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, President of the American Pediatric Society, Chairman of the Section on Cardiology of the AAP, and editor of the classic general pediatric textbook, Rudolph’s Pediatrics. His contributions to cardiac care of the infant are extraordinary, and he is a true Legend of Neonatology.

Get social with NEO Conference

Forrest M. Bird, MD, PhD, ScD

In 1954, Dr. Bird founded the Bird Products Corporation to market and develop his respirator devices. In 1955, he created the Bird Universal Medical Respirator and flew to medical schools to test his invention on critically-ill patients who were expected to die of cardiopulmonary failure. This device became the first universal mass-produced medical respirator for acute or chronic cardiopulmonary care, and was sold under the trade name Bird Mark 7 Respirator.

Dr. Bird invented a pediatric respirator in 1970. Nicknamed the “Babybird” respirator, this device significantly reduced infant mortality for babies with respiratory problems.

By the 1980s, he invented the Intrapulmonary Percussive Ventilation or IPV, a major advance in mechanical cardiopulmonary care. In 1992, the V.I.P. Bird Infant Pediatric System was introduced. The TBird Ventilator Series is the first and only ventilator that is truly mobile.

On October 7, 2009, President Barack Obama awarded Dr. Bird the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in recognition of his “outstanding contributions to the promotion of technology for the improvement of the economic, environmental or social well-being of the United States.”

Stanley J. Dudrick, MD

Dr. Dudrick is highly regarded throughout the scientific, academic and clinical
world for his pioneering research of intravenous hyperalimentation (IVH), or
total parenteral nutrition (TPN). The development and success of this specialized central venous feeding technique has been described as one of the four most significant accomplishments in the history of the development of modern
surgery, together with the discovery and development of asepsis and antisepsis, antibiotic therapy and anesthesia (Journal of the American Medical Association 1978: 239 (3): 192). This modality, along with open heart surgery and organ transplantation, has also been acknowledged as one of the three most important advancements in surgery during the past century.

Dr. Dudrick’s continued investigative efforts have focused on outcomes in critically-ill patients as well as the nutritional and biochemical manipulation of amino acid, carbohydrate, fat and micronutrient metabolism and their interrelationships with nutritional status.

Get social with NEO Conference