Welcome to NICU Brainy Kids, and thanks for coming!

To join our team and attend this year’s Race for Every Child, click the “Join NICU Brainy Kids” button next to our name above. On October 19th, you can walk or run and be a part of the team that supports patients treated at Children’s National, the D.C. metro region’s #1 children’s hospital.

You can also choose to support our team with just a click on one of the donation buttons under our name “NICU Brainy Kids.” Donating to our team means you are supporting the Neonatal Neurocritical Care Program that was founded, developed, and cherished by Dr. Taeun Chang. With your help, we will continue the mission of our late colleague and friend Dr. Chang to improve the neurologic care of infants in the NICU not only at Children’s National, but around the world.

This past year, the Neonatal Neurocritical Care Program has made significant strides from both clinical and research perspectives. Our Hemimegalencephaly Program has seen tremendous advances in the number of patients receiving our novel embolization treatment and in the continual refinement of procedural management to optimize care and outcomes. We also acted as the lead site in a NICU clinical drug trial that examines the benefits and side effects of phenobarbital, an anti-seizure medication. Now, we are gearing up to start recruiting patients for an observational study that looks at the effects of therapeutic hypothermia in newborn infants with mild hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE). 

We are immensely grateful to have grown our team this year with the additions of Lindsay Ruffini, CPNP-AC/PC as our Neonatal Neurology Program manager and Drs. Kelsey Elizabeth Christoffel and Daniel Licht as attendings. 

We greatly appreciate your contributions, which will be used to directly support our research and program.

To share this team’s page on Facebook or other social media, copy and paste the link into a browser.

Thank you for your generosity!

Tammy Tsuchida, Tayyba Anwar, Lindsay Ruffini, Adre Du Plessis, Youssef Kousa, Sarah Mulkey, Sarah Schlatterer, & Kelsey Christoffel