Maryam Naim

I am an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and an attending physician in the Division of Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Medicine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Over the last 10 years my research and clinical efforts have been dedicated to improving outcomes for children in the cardiac intensive care unit using novel and established methods of monitoring. I am particularly interested in improving the neurological outcomes of children with congenital heart disease. I have been working in the cardiac arrest research laboratory to investigate a novel method of performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation to a hemodynamic target. The American Heart Association has recommended this form of resuscitation but our laboratory is the first to show in a preclinical animal model that survival and neurological outcomes are improved following this method of resuscitation. I have implemented routine neuromonitoring with electroencephalography in neonates with congenital heart diseases in the cardiac intensive care unit. My work has shown that seizures are common in these neonates and are usually subclinical, would not be identified without monitoring, and are associated with brain injury on neuroimaging. Seizures in these neonates have been associated with worse long term neurological outcomes. Neuromonitoring with diffuse optical spectroscopy and diffuse correlation spectroscopy in the same population has shown critical changes in cerebral oxygenation and blood flow that have been shown to correlate with brain injury on MRI.