Core Leadership
Kayla Karvonen, MD
Chair
Core Leadership
Kayla Karvonen grew up in Plymouth, Minnesota, majored in Biochemistry & Cell Biology and Psychology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and attended medical school at the University of Virginia. She completed her pediatrics residency and is currently a neonatal-perinatal fellow at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) where she served as Pediatrics Diversity Committee President from 2018-2020 and founded the Neonatal Justice Collaborative. She is currently a Preterm Birth Initiative Postdoctoral Transdisciplinary Research Fellow and is completing a Masters in Clinical Research at UCSF. Her research to date has focused on investigating racial disparities in adverse outcomes among infants who were born preterm. She hopes to continue assessing the impact of structural racism on preterm infant health and identifying and advocating for policies that reduce the impact of structural racism on Black infant health in her future work.
Yarden Fraiman, MD
Vice Chair
Core Leadership
Yarden Fraiman is an attending neonatologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He received his undergraduate degree at Princeton University, followed by his medical degree at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and MPH at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He completed his Pediatrics training in the Boston Combined Residency Program in Pediatrics and Neonatology training in the Harvard Neonatal-Perinatal Fellowship Training Program. In addition, he completed his research training in the Harvard-wide Pediatric Health Services Research Fellowship. Dr. Fraiman’s research focuses on racial and ethnic inequities in neonatology and pediatrics specifically, the role of modifiable structures and systems in society that continue to uphold neonatal health inequity across the pediatric life-course. His research aims to identify unique targets for population-based justice-orientated interventions. His research relies on life-course epidemiology and social ecological theory while utilizing multilevel analytic approaches to understand the many ways racism impacts health.
Margaret Parker, MD
Senior Advisor
Core Leadership
Kimberly Novod is the founder and executive director of Saul’s Light, a New Orleans-based nonprofit organization dedicated to addressing the unique psychosocial needs of Louisiana’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and bereaved families through direct services, advocacy, and education initiatives.
Learn about Saul's Light here.
Margaret Parker, MD
Senior Advisor
Core Leadership
Dr. Parker is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Director of Newborn Research at Boston Medical Center (BMC), Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Parker is a neonatal health services researcher and holds several federal and foundation grants in the area of social disparities in preterm birth outcomes; she has a particular interest in safe sleep and breastfeeding. Dr. Parker is also an expert in multi-site implementation science and is the Co-Chair of the Neonatal Quality Improvement Collaborative of Massachusetts and an Improvement Advisor from the Institute of Healthcare Improvement. She has led multi-site NICU quality improvements focused on breastfeeding and family engagement. Dr. Parker applies a health equity lens to her local and multi-site quality improvement projects and is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee of Fetus and Newborn.
Elizabeth Rogers, MD
Senior Advisor
Core Leadership
Dr. Elizabeth Rogers is a Professor of Pediatrics at University of California San Francisco, practices neonatology in the Intensive Care Nursery (ICN), and is the Director of the ROOTS Program, The Grove Small Baby Unit, and the research director of ICN Follow Up Program at UCSF. She also serves as the Associate Vice Chair for Faculty Development and Chief Experience Officer in the UCSF Department of Pediatrics. Her clinical and scholarly expertise is in preterm birth, health equity, neuroprotection, metabolic predictors of outcomes after preterm birth, palliative care, family-centered care and advocacy, long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes after neonatal critical illness, and in increasing physician vitality and improving work experience in health care. She has led follow up efforts for multicenter trials involving preterm and term infants at risk for pulmonary and neurodevelopmental impairment and serves on statewide and national quality improvement collaboratives. She received an AB summa cum laude in Slavic Languages and Literatures and History of Science from Harvard University and received her medical degree from Stanford University in 2003. She completed pediatric and neonatal-perinatal subspecialty training at UCSF in 2006 and 2010 respectively.