2026 Ron Litman Mentoring Awardees

Jeff Feldman MD and Daphne Klausner

It’s hard to believe but it’s been 4 years since Ron Litman’s untimely death from leukemia in 2021. Ron started the PAAD during a brief window of recovery following his 2nd bone marrow transplant. He was an internationally known and respected medical educator, author, and clinician who spent most of his career at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where he inspired and trained generations of pediatric anesthesiologists. Ron continues to influence the specialty of Pediatric Anesthesia despite the fact that he is no longer with us in person.  The PAAD that he began during his illness is a vibrant publication read daily by 6,800 people in 99 countries.  That he stayed positive and productive even as he fought cancer was true to his nature. The PAAD’s executive council have kept the PAAD going as a living and loving tribute to him and his memory.

Each year the Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia’s (CHOP) Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine provides an award of $25,000 to a mentored project in honor of Ron Litman. This award is possible due to generous contributions by Ron's wife, Daphne Klausner, and others who created a sustaining endowment in his memory. This award emphasizes the importance of mentoring to Ron - “He loved to teach and mentor. That was his favorite thing to do.” For the FY ’26 award there were four excellent proposals making the selection process challenging. We are pleased to announce the fourth annual recipients of the Litman award.

2026 Ron Litman Mentorship award winners

Madiha Raees, MD, Assistant Professor Division of Critical Care Medicine

Bianca Nfonoyim Bernhard, MD, CHOP Fellow in Emergency Medicine and Global Health

Their project entitled: Bubble-CRiSP: Bubble CPAP in Resource-limited Settings in Pediatrics. Their proposal described prior work that set the stage for this proposal:

This project will provide the equipment and education needed to implement non-invasive ventilation in the care of children with respiratory illnesses at Laquintinie Hospital (LHD) in Douala, Cameroon. Douala is one of 11 sister cities to Philadelphia with a relationship that began in 1986. (https://wacphila.org/public-programming/sister-cities/)

“Our group expanded an existing educational relationship with LHD when our partners identified a concern about high morbidity and mortality from respiratory illness in young children. … We analyzed 153 children under 5 years of age presenting with respiratory illnesses to the LHD emergency department from 2022-2023 and identified a disturbingly high mortality rate of 43% from diseases such as pneumonia (54%) and bronchiolitis (29%). Given the near universal use of low flow oxygen, our study identified the potential role for the introduction of simple, low-tech interventions such as bubble CPAP to reduce mortality, …”

Three other Mentor-Mentee pairs submitted competitive proposals:

Mentor: Charlotte Woods-Hill, MD Assistant Professor Division of Critical Care Medicine Mentee: Megan McSherry, MD Fellow in Critical Care Medicine

Project: A mixed methods retrospective cohort study using clinical pediatric cardiac arrest event data and electronic medical record documentation of prognostic goals-of-care (PGOC) conversations to describe timing, structure, and thematic content of PGOC conversations for children after cardiac arrest.

Mentor: Akira Nishisaki, MD Professor Division of Critical Care Medicine Mentee: Elizabeth Hyde, MD Fellow, Critical Care Medicine

Project: An innovative machine learning (ML) model capable of reliably classifying BMV breaths as high or low quality based solely on capnography waveforms.

Mentor: Vanessa Mazandi, MD Assistant Professor Division of Critical Care Medicine Mentee: Gabe Zuckerberg, MD Resident in Anesthesiology and Future Fellow in Critical Care Medicine

Project: A novel approach to neuroprotection during and after cardiac arrest (CA) using brain oxygen-guided endovascular balloon (EB) inflation in a swine model.

Thanks to the members of the review committee - Allan Simpao, Annery Garcia-Marcinkewicz and Asif Padiyith for their time and assistance with the selection process.

Updates from Prior Award winners

FY 25 – Mentor Annery Garcia-Marcinkewicz writes:

The award has been extremely helpful in supporting the start of our project. I have been able to have both of the trainees, Benilda and Flo spend time at CHOP over the summer to receive the necessary training and airway education for the project (attached some photos of us at work in Airway Lab). We made our three required learning videos that will be used during the study: conventional hyperangulated blade use approach, IGE method, and a combined video. We have obtained IRB approval for the study and after our Airway Symposium is concluded we plan to begin randomization.

Very grateful for the Dr. Litman Mentorship Award and the opportunities it has opened up for us as mentor-mentee team.

FY-25 Mentor Asif Padiyith writes:

“The multicenter cardiac catheterization-cardiac arrest study is progressing well. A data request proposal has been submitted to the American College of Cardiology (ACC) for access to the IMPACT registry, in collaboration with Marilyn Paul (BS-MD Student at Drexel) and Michael O’Byrne, MD, MSCE (Interventional Cardiology, CHOP). The proposal is currently under review by the ACC Scientific Committee, and data access is anticipated by summer 2025. The overarching goal of the study is to identify predictors of cardiac arrest occurring during or within 72 hours of congenital cardiac catheterization. Marilyn Paul will lead the analysis under the mentorship of Asif Padiyath, MBBS (Cardiothoracic Anesthesia, CHOP), who is being guided by Michael O’Byrne, MD, MSCE. The study has three aims: (1) to evaluate the ability of a simple model based on the PREDIC3T score to predict cardiac arrest risk, (2) to develop a logistic regression model using patient and procedural factors from the IMPACT registry and compare its performance to the PREDIC3T model, and (3) to develop and validate a machine learning-based model using the same IMPACT data and compare its predictive performance to both the PREDIC3T and logistic regression models.”

FY-24 Mentor Olivia Nelson writes:

A Patient Blood Management program should balance the risk of failing to diagnose treatable causes of preoperative anemia with the harm of subjecting infants to low yield laboratory blood draws. We found opportunities for improvement in both categories!

Our study population included 2,348 healthy infants <4 months of age presenting for elective surgery from home. We excluded ASA >3 and infants <7 days old.

We found that a preoperatively identified hemoglobin of <10 g/dL rarely resulted in referral to Hematology or further work up or treatment for anemia. Only 12 patients received pre-operative iron. Intraoperative transfusion was rare (<1%) and occurred only during surgeries with medium-high risk of surgical blood loss such as craniotomy for cranial springs. Dr. Scott Dubow, Medical Director of the Preoperative evaluation clinic at CHOP is initiating a QI project to adjust our preoperative CBC testing accordingly. For example, 30% of patients in this study were undergoing inguinal hernia repair. This represents a substantial number of patients who could forgo preoperative bloodwork!

We also identified a missed opportunity for infants undergoing surgeries at medium to high risk of surgical blood loss. Overall, we found that 25% of infants had a hemoglobin <10 g/dL, which represents a number of patients who could benefit from preoperative optimization of their anemia.

Sasha Capers, the mentee on this project graduated from the University of Pennsylvania last May and is currently working as a Medical Assistant in the Department of Pulmonary and Sleep Medicine at Bryn Mawr Medical Specialists Association and is applying to medical school. The manuscript is in the process of being written.

For PAAD readers, if this sounds interesting to you, consider this an invitation-- and shameless plug-- to join the SPA Patient Blood Management Special Interest Group. I just took over as Chair from Susan Goobie, who will be advising me as Past Chair. I am excited about sharing institutional practices and pooling multicenter data to identify and promote best practices.

FY-23 Mentor Anushree Doshi writes:

We are currently in the manuscript part of the process, while also gearing towards phase 2 of our Health Literacy Initiative. We have been lucky to recruit two new sites - Johns Hopkins All Children's and OHSU who will join us as we explore potential outcomes linked to limited health literacy. This is a large undertaking that will take time and support, but one we are excited to pursue.

Isabel Torres, our first Litman recipient, was pivotal in getting this project off the ground! She was able to present this project last year at IARS and did a phenomenal job! She is currently getting a Master's in Cognitive Neuroscience and Social Psychology from NYU and is excited to remain involved in exploring disparities in care.