Meet the Team
Dr. Adamson is the Project Champion for the PKB. He serves as the Chief of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics and is the Director of the Office of Clinical and Translational Research at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Adamson is also the Chair of Developmental Therapeutics at the Children's Oncology Group. Dr. Adamson, along with Dr. Barrett, championed the PKB concept to the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and was selected for funding.
Dr. Barrett is the Project Leader for the PKB. He developed the initial PKB concept that was reviewed and eventually funded by the CHOP Pediatrics Chairs Committee. Dr. Barrett is a career scientist with research interests that involve the optimal use of medications used in the care of pediatric patients. He spent 13 years in the pharmaceutical industry primarily involved with researching the clinical pharmacology of drugs for AIDS, Cancer, Heart Disease, Parkinson's Disease and sedation/pain prior to joining the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia over 4 years ago.
While his industrial career was primarily focused on adult drug development, Dr. Barrett had conducted several pediatric pharmacology studies used for drug registration with the FDA and became interested in the problem of pediatric pharmacotherapy, namely the vast information gap that caregivers face when prescribing medicine to children. He was also involved in several, global data integration and warehousing projects while in industry and has been developing tools to facilitate modeling and simulation application for the past 10 years.
Currently, he serves as the Principal Investigator of the CHOP Pediatric Pharmacology Research Unit (PPRU), an NIH consortium of pediatric research centers of excellence. He is a Fellow of both the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) and American College of Clinical Pharmacology (ACCP) and a standing member of the FDA Clinical Pharmacology Advisory Committee. Dr. Barrett spearheads the PPRU network data integration platform effort as well which has the long-term vision of creating a global pediatric data repository. He is also dedicated to training the next generation of clinical pharmacologists and is first recipient of the ACCP mentorship in Clinical Pharmacology award. As the visionary for the PKB, Dr. Barrett is completely committed to its evolution and fully engaged with the team to develop new dashboards.
Dr. Athena Zuppa
Dr. Athena Zuppa is the Chair of the PKB Steering Committee. In this capacity, she facilitates the selection of drug candidates for dashboard consideration and provides direction for the clinical functionality of the PKB environment. Dr. Zuppa also aids in the identification of physician champions to assist in the development of individual dashboards.
Dr. Zuppa is an attending physician in Critical Care and Anesthesiology and jointly serves the Division of Clinical Pharmacology. She is board certified in Pediatrics, Clinical Pharmacology and Critical Care. Given her clinical experience in the CHOP PICU, she is uniquely aware of the problems that face care givers when administering pharmaceuticals to children. As she also holds a degree in Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, she is uniquely aware of the potential for model-based decision support to guide pharmacotherapy and provide a means to educate physicians on the relevance of clinical pharmacologic principles to the management of their patients.
Dr. Zuppa is completely dedicated to the investigation of drug behavior in critically-ill children. She is funded by the NIH to explore the sources of variation in this difficult to study population and has already published a model-based analysis of the drug milrinone in children undergoing ultrafiltration during cardiopulmonary bypass that has changed the standard of care for these children.
Mr. Mahesh Narayan
Mr. Mahesh Narayan Mahesh Narayan is the Project Manager for the Pediatric Knowledgebase (PKB) Initiative. In this role, Mr. Narayan has the responsibility of planning and execution of the project. He also ensures the success of the project by serving as the primary liaison and fostering communication between the key team members. He works closely with Dr. Barrett, Project Leader, in ensuring that the project runs smoothly and meets expected milestones.
Mr. Narayan has also been involved with other initiatives at CHOP, most notably the Patient-Flow Initiative with Dr. Evan Fieldston where he is leading the discrete event simulation effort to identify bottlenecks, prevent overcrowding and decrease the length of stay of patients, particularly in the PICU. Mr. Narayan is also collaborating with Dr. Maria Mascarenhas in trying to convince the Global Health Initiative at CHOP to partner with a leading Academic Medical Center in Bangalore (India) to study the burden of vector-borne emerging infectious diseases among children of India.
Mr. Narayan has a Bachelors in Comprehensive Science from Villanova University with minors in Biology, Mathematics and Business and a dual Masters in Biotechnology and Bioengineering from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His long term goal is to facilitate the creation of the first pediatric-only research hospital in India, mirrored from his experience at CHOP. Likewise, his involvement with the evolution of the PKB will hopefully promote a more global penetration of the PKB as other children's hospitals receive exposure to this concept.
Dr. Sundararajan Vijayakumar
Dr. Vijayakumar (Vijay) is the solution and data architect for PKB. Vijay is a principal at INTEK Partners, a leading developer of custom solutions for supporting research and development within the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare vertical market segments. INTEK has successfully led several efforts from concept to implementation for several large multi-national corporations. Dr. Vijayakumar and Dr. Barrett have worked together in the past and successfully implemented an enterprise wide, workflow driven clinical data integration solution for Aventis Pharma.
Dr. Vijayakumar is experienced in several areas of Information Technology to include business process and domain analysis, solution architectures, data flow analysis, modeling and several approaches of enterprise data integration to include data warehouses, data marts and real-time integration via federated query processing. Key projects executed under his leadership include warehousing solutions for biological screening data, in-Silico chemical properties of potential drug candidates, chemical registration systems (reagents, combinatorial libraries, enumerated products), synthesis planning, sample-analysis-request submission and tracking system, and a centralized archival solution for analytical-instrumental data with support for desktop retrieval. Vijay holds a Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry and a postgraduate diploma in Computer Science (equivalent to a BS in computer Science). He is also a SUN certified JAVA Architect for implementing Java based solutions and a member of the American Chemical Society and American Association for Advancement of Science.
Vijay's modeling experience includes molecular mechanics, statistical mechanics, QSAR and conformational analysis. Following his Ph. D. he undertook a post-doctoral fellowship to gain experience on structure-functional analysis of large biological macromolecules and published several papers on Beta-lactamase, PDH Kinase, HIV binding proteins CD4 and GP120, Lambda Repressor-Operator complex and others on analytical methods to aid research and development of presentation tools.