Seetha Shankaran MD

Dr. Seetha Shankaran, M.D. neonatologist at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan was the principal investigator of the 1st randomized controlled trial of whole-body cooling for neonatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE). Considered a pioneer in finding effective methods for protecting HIE-affected newborns, she led a landmark 2005 study in the New England Journal of Medicine to help make the 72-hour “cooling blanket” procedure the standard of care in treating this condition. Several of her subsequent papers in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA have further tested the optimization of cooling therapy in newborns and long term outcomes of cooled infants. She was also the first author in the publications which have validated a scoring system for MRI as a prognostic marker for neonatal encephalopathy.