Kate Deanehan, MD

Dr. Donald H. Shaffner is an associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is an expert in critical care medicine. Dr. Shaffner earned his M.D. from the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He completed a residency in pediatrics at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital and a residency in anesthesiology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Shaffner performed a fellowship in pediatric anesthesia and pediatric critical care at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.His research interests include the mechanisms involved in neurologic injury from global ischemia caused by cardiac arrest and resuscitation, the prevention of post-injury hyperthermia in children with head trauma, and the neurologic outcomes of children who survive cardiac arrest.Dr. Shaffner is a member of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, the American Society of Anesthesiologists, the American Heart Association, and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics. He has published numerous articles on CPR and has been both moderator and speaker at national CPR meetings.

An expert in foodborne and intestinal infections, Cynthia Sears is a professor of medicine and oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the microbiome program leader of the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins and is director of the Johns Hopkins Germ-free Murine Facility.She is an infectious diseases expert who has focused on gut infections including diarrhea, foodborne illnesses Clostridium difficile (C. diff) and Helicobacter pylori during her career. In the laboratory and in clinical settings, she has studied the pathogenesis of enterotoxigenic Bacteroides fragilis (ETBF) over the past 25 years. The current focus of the Sears laboratory is to determine how the microbiota and specific bacteria contribute to colon carcinogenesis. The Sears laboratory integrates studies in humans and mouse models, employing microbiology, bioinformatics and immunologic methods. Dr. Sears has worked abroad in Thailand, Brazil, Haiti, Bangladesh and Malaysia.Dr. Sears served as associate editor of Clinical Infectious Diseases from 2000 to 2016. She has been an active member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) for more than 20 years, serving the society in numerous capacities, and is currently president of the organization. Dr. Sears received her medical degree from Thomas Jefferson Medical College followed by training in internal medicine at The New York Hospital (Cornell Medical School) in New York City. She trained in infectious diseases at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute and the University of Virginia. Dr. Sears joined the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1988.

Dr. Corina Noje is an assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Noje is a pediatric critical care clinician, educator, and program builder with expertise in pediatric critical care transport medicine. Dr. Noje came to Johns Hopkins in 2009 for her pediatric critical care fellowship and then joined the PICU faculty in July of 2012. In January 2014, she became Medical Director for Johns Hopkins Pediatric Transport (JHPT).Dr. Noje is interested in patient transport because of its diverse and versatile nature, as well as its high impact on patient outcomes. Evidence suggests that optimal care during the early acute illness is critical to long-term outcome. Therefore, delivering state-of-the-art care during transport can save precious time. The JHPT service receives requests from more than 60 centers in Maryland and neighboring states, as well as from facilities outside of the United States. They also coordinate pediatric transport out of Johns Hopkins. Her team must triage the patients, determine the mode of transportation (ambulance, helicopter, or airplane), and manage care while on the move, often with advanced modes of ventilation, ongoing hemodynamic and neurologic resuscitation, and even ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) support. Her team also works to make palliative critical care transport feasible, thus enabling terminally ill children to spend their end of life at home with family. Critical care transport allows such patients to be transported home while still receiving artificial ventilation, hemodynamic support, and nutrition.Dr. Noje’s work focuses on expanding the JHPT service as well as optimizing transport triage and clinical management of the critically ill child in transport. Her interests include transport-specific clinical protocol development, use of telemedicine, pediatric in-transport resuscitation, optimal disposition of children transported with brain injury, pediatric palliative care transport program development, and staff/patient safety during interfacility pediatric ambulance transport. Her transport work contributed to consistent growth of the JHPT program, which received statewide recognition for delivering the highest quality, compassionate care to our region’s sickest children and was awarded the 2021 Outstanding Program of the Year Star of Life Award by MIEMSS.Dr. Noje’s transport expertise is recognized through publications on the transport of critically ill children, transport chapters in pediatric textbooks, requests to peer-review transport manuscripts in pediatric journals, and invitations to speak about her program and help organize national conferences on the topic of pediatric transport medicine. She is very involved with the American Academy of Pediatrics, Section on Transport Medicine, and was recently appointed its Membership Chair.Dr. Noje finds her work very rewarding because she is able to help the community, parents, and children by bringing patients to the place of definitive care and delivering excellent pediatric care both in transport and in the PICU. Moreover, she knows that the teams of transport paramedics and EMTs, respiratory therapists, PICU nurses, fellows, and attending physicians with whom she works spare nothing to provide the best care possible. In her free time, Dr. Noje enjoys spending time with her family, traveling, gardening, decorating, and listening to opera and classical music.Dr. Noje finished medical school in Bucharest, Romania, in 2005 at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy "Carol Davila". She then carried out her pediatric residency at St. Barnabas Hospital in New York from 2006 to 2009 and her pediatric critical care fellowship at Johns Hopkins from 2009 to 2012.