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The Top Doctors list is created each year by Castle Connolly to help people find the best-in-class healthcare providers in their city. Castle Connolly's Top Doctor directory allows patients to search not only by doctors and hospitals in their area, but by other factors such as specialty, conditions, insurance and location.

Our doctors are listed among the top 1 percent of the nation’s physicians and among the top 10 percent of the region’s specialists by Castle Connolly Medical Ltd., a New York City research and information company that publishes the annual guidebooks America’s Top Doctors and Top Doctors: New York Metro Area, which informs New York Magazine’s annual “Top Doctors” issue.

The most important criterion for physician selection was excellence in patient care. Other criteria included education, residency, board-certification, fellowships, professional reputation, hospital affiliation, medical school faculty appointment, experience and disciplinary history.

We are thrilled to see so many physicians from the Department of Pediatrics on this pretigious list. Congratulations to you all!  

Dr. Anjali Rajadhyaksha, professor of neuroscience in pediatrics and Associate Dean of Program Development and Dr. Francis Lee, interim Dean at Weill Cornell Medicine have been awarded an R01 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse their study entitled, “Circuit and Synaptic Mechanisms of Endocannabinoid-Opioid Crosstalk.”

The current opioid crisis has contributed to drug overdoses becoming the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50 years, with a constant increase in overdose deaths among adolescents. Opioids (morphine, oxycodone, fentanyl) remain the main line of medications for pain management, underscoring the urgent need for new non-opioid treatment options or adjuvant therapies that eliminate the addictive properties, but not the analgesic aspects of these medications.

Adolescence is an important developmental period between childhood and adulthood during which the brain is highly plastic and influenced by a variety of environmental factors.  Exposure to substances of abuse during adolescence can impact the developing brain and lead to abnormalities in brain function including neurocognitive performance. 

Two Weill Cornell Medicine faculty members, Dr. Gregory Sonnenberg and Dr. Melody Zeng, are recipients of prestigious awards from the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) for their accomplishments in the field of immunology.

Dr. Sonnenberg is the 2023 recipient of the AAI-BD Biosciences Investigator Award, recognizing his outstanding contributions to the field of immunology as a mid-career scientist, and Dr. Zeng is a recipient of an AAI ASPIRE Award, recognizing her work as an early-career immunologist and potential for advancing the field of immunology. The AAI has been dedicated to advancing immunology to improve health and fostering development opportunities for immunologists since it was founded in 1913.

The Department of Pediatrics is pleased to announce the promotion of Kimberley Chien, M.D. to Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, effective December 1, 2022.

Dr. Chien is an Associate Attending Pediatrician at New York-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital and New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.  She is board-certified in pediatrics and pediatric gastroenterology.  She received a B.S. in Neuroscience at Tufts University and earned her medical degree at SUNY-Downstate Medical College of Brooklyn.  She completed her pediatric internship and residency training at NYU School of Medicine and attended New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center to complete fellowship training in Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition. 

This article was originally posted in the WCM Patient News

Stuffing and candy and pie, oh my! ‘Tis the season for overeating, and for eating too many of the “wrong” foods without enough of the right ones to counterbalance them. Seasonal excess is tough enough for our adult digestive tracts to handle, but our children may have an even harder time digesting all those tempting, less-than-healthy holiday offerings.

The good news is that there are plenty of steps parents can take to foster healthy eating while indulging in just a few holiday treats and a limitless amount of family fun.

Dr. Kimberley Chien, assistant attending pediatrician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital’s Phyllis and David Komansky Center for Children's Health and assistant professor of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, offers the following tips that will help keep your kids’ GI tracts in tip-top shape while building healthy eating habits for life.

This article was originally posted on the WCM Newsroom

In 2021, a group of scientists led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian reported that the Moderna mRNA vaccine and a protein-based vaccine candidate containing an adjuvant, a substance that enhances immune responses, elicited durable neutralizing antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 during infancy in pre-clinical research.

Now a follow-up study by the same group, published Dec. 1 in Science Translational Medicine, has found that the 2-dose vaccines still provide protection against lung disease in rhesus macaques one year after they had been vaccinated as infants.

An unusual type of antibody that even at miniscule levels neutralizes the Zika virus and renders the virus infection undetectable in preclinical models has been identified by a team led by Weill Cornell Medicine, NewYork-Presbyterian and National Institutes of Health (NIH) investigators. 

Because Zika can cause birth defects when passed from a pregnant person to their fetus, this discovery could lead to the development of therapies to protect babies from the potentially devastating effects of this disease. 

In research published Nov. 18 in Cell, the investigators isolated an ultrapotent immunoglobulin M (IgM) antibody — a five-armed immune protein that latches onto the virus— using blood cells taken from pregnant people infected with Zika. In experiments with mice, they determined that the antibody not only protected the animals from otherwise lethal infections, but also suppressed the virus to the point that it could not be detected in their blood. 

Eric J. Mallack, M.D., Director of the Leukodystrophy Center and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at Weill Cornell Medicine is the Co-Principal Investigator of a new phase 2/3 clinical trial, sponsored by Minoryx Therapeutics. The “NEXUS” study will assess the efficacy and safety of leriglitazone in pediatric patients with early-stage cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy (cALD).

 Alongside Co-PI, Patricia Musolino, MD, PhD from Massachusetts General Hospital, the team aims to confirm whether researchers can halt or stabilize early cerebral ALD, a progressive inflammatory neurodegenerative disease of childhood, with leriglitazone - a novel, orally bioavailable and selective PPAR gamma agonist.   If proven effective, this will be the first non-transplant-related therapy (e.g. stem cell transplant and gene therapy) that can halt this childhood neurodegenerative disorder.  And if delivered early enough, it may stop the disease in the pre-symptomatic period of disease, thus preserving full neurological function in these patients.  

 The imaging outcomes in the study were developed from Dr. Mallack’s quantitative MRI research in lesion volumetry (PMID: 34503945), and Dr. Musolino’s work in MR Perfusion (PMID: 22961546).

This article was originally posted on EurekAlert.

A multi-institutional team of scientists, led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine’s Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children's Health, have received a five-year $8.297 grant to continue funding a Center for Lupus Research. The grant, awarded by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases of the National Institutes of Health, will allow researchers to explore the underlying mechanisms of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) in children with the goal of better tailoring treatment.

“Pediatric lupus is often underrecognized, but up to a quarter of people with the illness have disease that starts in childhood,” said Dr. Virginia Pascual, program director of the Center for Lupus Research and the Drukier Director of the Drukier Institute for Children's Health at Weill Cornell Medicine.

We are pleased to announce Sheila J. Carroll, M.D. and Patrick A. Flynn, M.D. have been named Interim Co-Chiefs of Pediatric Cardiology, effective October 1, 2022. Dr. Carroll, who serves as the Director Fetal Cardiology, and Dr. Flynn, who serves as the Director of the Echocardiography Lab, will provide proven leadership and oversight for the Division’s activities, including liaising with Department administration and supporting the Department’s vision and missions in patient care, research, and education as well as quality, diversity, and inclusion.

We are grateful for the excellence and innovation of current chief Dr. Ralf Holzer. Under Dr. Holzer’s leadership from 2017 to 2022, the Division dramatically grew its pediatric cardiac catheterization program, expanded its clinical Pediatric Cardiology practice to Lower Manhattan, strengthened relationships with partner departments and institutions, and achieved the first premature infant transcatheter PDA closure in Manhattan. We wish Dr. Holzer well in his future endeavors.

Pediatrics Weill Cornell Medicine Appointments & Referrals: (646) 962-KIDS (646) 962-5437 Chair's Office: Weill Cornell Medicine 525 E 68th St.
Box 225
New York, NY 10065 (646) 962-5437