Melania Bembea

Dr. Bembea is an Associate Professor of Anesthesiology/Critical Care Medicine and Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She completed residency training in Pediatrics at the Cleveland Clinic (2006). She then pursued fellowship training in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine (2009) and a PhD in Clinical Investigation (2014), both at Johns Hopkins. As part of two consecutive career development NIH awards, she conducted a combination of surveys, systematic reviews and prospective observational studies to define disturbances in coagulation and to monitor for neurologic injury in children on ECMO using novel plasma brain injury biomarkers, with the ultimate goal to improve survival and neurodevelopmental outcomes of these critically-ill children. Dr. Bembea is the Medical Director of the Neonatal and Pediatric ECMO program at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. She works collaboratively within ELSO and other organizations on the creation of simulation curricula and clinical practice guidelines for ECMO. Dr. Bembea is the current Chair of the multicenter Pediatric ECMO Research Collaborative between the Pediatric Acute Lung Injury and Sepsis Investigators (PALISI) Network and ELSO.