MODCAST – Details, episodes & analysis

March of Dimes Senior Director of Research Operations Jonathan Cherry on March of Dimes research grants and awards.

Dr. Nima Aghaeepour, an investigator at the March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center at Stanford, and Dr. Sarah England, the director of the Center for Reproductive Health Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine, discuss a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) model that found that sleepers and movers have a 52% reduced risk of delivering early while those sleeping and moving less have a 44% increased risk of delivering early. 

Philadelphia neonatologists Dr. Jay Greenspan and Dr. Liz Foglia discuss three talks at the upcoming Hot Topics in Neonatology conference in Maryland: one on the lower limits of viability and the other two on racism in the NICU.

Dr. Nima Aghaeepour, a researcher at March of Dimes' Prematurity Research Center at Stanford, discusses a Machine Learning (ML) model that predicts prematurity-related newborn diseases weeks before they occur, including before a baby is even born. 

Prof. MacIntyre, one of the directors of the March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center at Imperial College London, discusses his team's new device that can, in under two minutes, identify the type of bacteria in a woman's vaginal microbiome and determine whether it's causing inflammation, and could lead to preterm birth. 

Stanford University Science Fellow Dr. Mira Moufarrej on what we know about preeclampsia, why Black women in the U.S. are disproportionately impacted and a new blood test that could identify at-risk women in the first trimester. 

Dr. Marina Sirota, principal investigator at the March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center at the University of California San Francisco, and colleagues Dr. Tomiko Oskotsky and Dr. Jonathan Golob discuss using big data to launch a DREAM Challenge that succeeded in creating two predictive models for preterm birth risk.

March of Dimes Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Emre Seli discusses the motivations behind the podcast, the research vision at March of Dimes, our belief in open, collaborative science, and our focus on translational research that makes a difference for moms and babies. 

The 2024 winners of the March of Dimes Basil O'Connor Starter Scholar Research Awards, Dr. Elizabeth Enninga and Dr. Mara Murray Horwitz, discuss their areas of study. Dr. Enninga, an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Immunology, at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic, explains how cell free (cf) fetal DNA triggers labor and preterm birth, and how understanding more about this process can help prevent early labor and more effectively induce labor. Dr. Murray Horwitz, a primary care doctor at Boston Medical Center and an assistant professor of medicine at Boston University, discusses barriers women with a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy (HDP), like preeclampsia, face in achieving cardiac and overall health after childbirth, and delves into an intervention called patient navigation that can lessen those barriers.

Dr. Alan Flake, the Director of the Center for Fetal Research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and 2021 March of Dimes Prize recipient, discusses the most impactful pursuits of his career: fetal surgery, the artificial womb, and in utero stem cell therapy.