Meet the PAAD's airway team

Myron Yaster MD

We have approximately 25 members on the PAAD’s executive council who serve as our writers, reviewers, and editors. I thought it was high time that I introduce them to you and have asked them to submit a head shot photo and short bio. I will introduce all of them to you over the next few weeks.

Dr James Peyton MBChB MRCP FRCA, Senior Associate in Perioperative Anesthesia, Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care, and Pain Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA, Assistant Professor in Anaesthesia, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Jamie originally trained in the UK, initially in acute and emergency medicine before seeing the light and moving into anesthesia. After finishing his training in the UK he worked as a Consultant anaesthetist in Bristol before his American wife decided he should move to Boston to take up a fellowship position in pediatric anesthesia in 2012. During his fellowship he worked with Pete Kovatsis and Ray Park in the early days of the Pediatric Difficult Intubation Registry and led some of the first work on video laryngoscopy use within the registry. Since then he has led, and contributed to, many projects arising from the multinational collaborative including multiple PEDiR analyses, the groundbreaking VISI trial and recent BJA/ESAIC neonatal and infant airway management guidelines. He is a senior member of the Boston Children’s Hospital Airway Research Group and continues to play an active role in the PEDI collaborative as well as working on internal projects aimed at improving patient safety and how airway management is thought of and taught.

Jamie has also been instrumental in highlighting the work of the PEDiR collaborative and the advances in airway safety they have driven through speaking regularly at national and international conferences, and he chaired the 35^th annual meeting of the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia in 2022. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Pediatric Anesthesia and reviewer for the PAAD and multiple journals including The Lancet, Anaesthesia, BJA, A&A, Journal of Pediatric Critical Care and Anesthesiology as well as several surgical journals.

Dr. Melissa Brooks Peterson is a pediatric anesthesiologist in Denver, Colorado who practices full time at Children's Hospital Colorado.  She completed medical school at Michigan Medical School (Go Blue!), residency at Brigham & Women's Hospital / Harvard Medical School and a pediatric anesthesia  fellowship at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Her clinical interests include complex airway management, Aerodigestive multidisciplinary care, longitudinal care of complex airway malformations, laryngotracheal reconstruction, cricothyroid resection, bronchoscopy and interventional techniques, high throughput ENT surgery in healthy kids, caring for kids with Epidermolysis Bullosa, and management of patients with mucopolysaccharidosis diseases. From an academic perspective, Melissa has published and spoken on outcomes of pediatric patients with Covid-19, comprehensive management of children with EB, multidisciplinary Aerodigestive care, anesthesia and standardization for kids having ENT surgery, with the PEDI-R / PEDI-Collaborative, and extensively for the Pediatric Anesthesia Article of the Day. 

When not doing the clinical and academic work that she truly loves, Melissa can be found working for the Colorado Society of Anesthesiologists on the Board of Directors, the American Society of Anesthesiologists as a Delegate and on committees, the Aerodigestive Society on the strategic committee, the Pediatric Anesthesia Article of the Day Executive Council and -- her favorite job of all -- working on behalf of the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia. In her beginning years on the SPA Board of Directors, Melissa helped to pave the way for establishing an Advocacy arm of the SPA to improve children's health and our society's visibility in the Advocacy space. She continues to be an active leader in the educational missions of the SPA, the Pediatric Difficult Intubation REgistry (PEDI-R) on the Executive Committee. As she will proudly announce to anyone who will listen, "The SPA Meeting is the best time of the year!"  For the future of the SPA, Melissa envisions continued educational excellence, child's health and SPA member advocacy efforts, SPA camaraderie at and between meetings, collaboration of the SPA's many committees and interest groups, and securing the financial growth and future for the SPA and its members.  

Outside of medicine, Melissa is a happy Denverite with a busy, full, active life with her husband Mark and 3 children, Grant, Owen and Whitney. With her family and friends, Melissa enjoys being a lacrosse mom, skiing, golfing (poorly), riding peloton, running, eating out with friends, food and wine pairing, being an uber driver for her kids and reading fiction.