Study Leadership

Christopher P. Landrigan, MD, MPH

Dr. Landrigan is Research Director of the Inpatient Pediatrics Service at Boston Children’s Hospital, Director of the Sleep and Patient Safety Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He is a graduate of Haverford College (BA), the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (MD), and the Harvard School of Public Health (MPH). He completed pediatric residency training and a hospitalist / health services research fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a fellowship in health policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Landrigan has been working at Boston Children’s Hospital as a pediatric hospitalist and patient safety researcher for over 15 years. He has led numerous studies regarding: the effects of physician sleep deprivation on patient safety; quality and efficiency in pediatric hospitalist vs. traditional care systems; variation in the use of evidence-based therapies; the performance of adverse event surveillance systems in hospitals; statewide temporal trends in rates of adverse events; the effects of the ACGME duty hour standards on safety, education, and resident physician quality of life; the effects of computerized order entry systems on patient safety; the relationship between house staff depression, burnout, and patient safety; and the effects of handoff and communication improvements on patient safety. From this research, he has authored or co-authored over 100 articles in the medical literature, including publications in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, BMJ, Pediatrics, JAMA Pediatrics, and other leading journals. In addition, Dr. Landrigan was the first chair and is currently an Executive Council Member of the Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings (PRIS) Network, a collaboration of over 100 pediatric hospitals studying quality and variation in the care of hospitalized children, with the goal of developing and disseminating improvements. Dr. Landrigan has received numerous awards for research, teaching, and innovation, including Boston Children’s Hospital’s Charles A. Janeway Award for Excellence in Clinical Teaching; Mount Sinai Medical School’s Saul Horowitz, Jr. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Medicine; the Sleep Research Society’s Young Investigator Award; the Society for Hospital Medicine’s Excellence in Research Award; and Academy Health’s Nemours Child Health Services Research Award, as well as election into Alpha Omega Alpha, the Society for Pediatric Research, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the American Pediatric Society. Dr. Landrigan is the Principal Investigator of I-PASS.



Nancy D. Spector, MD

Dr. Spector is the Director of the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine program, Associate Dean for Faculty Development, and Professor of Pediatrics at the Drexel University College of Medicine. Dr. Spector is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She completed pediatric residency training, as well as chief residency and a fellowship in General Academic Pediatrics at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. She received additional training in education and leadership at the Michigan State Primary Care Faculty Development Program, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Harvard Macy Institute, and the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine program. She worked in the Section of General Pediatrics at St. Christopher’s from 1997 to 2015. She served as the Associate Residency Program Director at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children from 2002 to 2012 and as the Residency Program Director from 2012 to 2016. She also served as the Associate Chair of Education and Faculty Development in the Department of Pediatrics at Drexel University College of Medicine from 2007-2016. Her scholarly work focuses on the development and implementation of competency-based educational programs, faculty development, professional development, mentoring programs, and leadership skills. She is the past Chair of the Association of Pediatric Program Directors (APPD) Faculty and Professional Development Task Force, as well as past Co-Chair of the APPD Mentorship Program. She was a member of the Academic Pediatric Association’s Mentoring Task Force and was the Co-Chair of the Federation of Pediatric Organization’s (FOPO) Working Group on Gender and Generations. In 2010, she was recognized as a leader and mentor when she became the recipient of the Robert S. Holm Award from the Association of Pediatric Program Directors. In 2011, she received the Elias Abrutyn Mentoring Award from the Drexel University College of Medicine, and in 2014, she was awarded the Miller Sarkin Mentoring Award from the Academic Pediatric Association. Dr. Spector is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha as well as the American Pediatric Society. Dr. Spector is the Chair of the Executive Council of the I-PASS Study Group that seeks to improve patient safety by standardizing provider communication, with a specific focus on improving transitions of care. She is also on the Board of Directors of the I-PASS Patient Safety Institute, a company that seeks to train institutions in best handoff practices and aid in their implementation.



Theodore C. Sectish, MD

Dr. Theodore C. Sectish is the Program Director and Vice Chair for Education at Boston Children’s Hospital of the Boston Combined Residency Program in Pediatrics and Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He graduated from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1977 and trained at Boston Children’s Hospital from 1977 to 1980. Dr. Sectish then practiced as a general pediatrician in Salinas, California from 1980 to 1993. He was the Program Director at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital from 1993-2007 and was an Associate Professor (Teaching) of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine when he left Stanford in 2007. His interest in educational innovation and improvement has spanned the continuum from undergraduate medical education to graduate medical education and the continuous professional development of practicing physicians. From January 1, 2007 to June 30, 2014, he was Executive Director of the Federation of Pediatric Organizations, an umbrella organization made up of the seven leading pediatric organizations. He is a member of the American Pediatric Society, the Association of Pediatric Program Directors (Past President), the Academic Pediatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Dr. Sectish is a member of the I-PASS Executive Council, Co-Chair of the Patient and Family-Centered I-PASS Education Executive Committee, Co-Chair of the Patient and Family Centered I-PASS Dissemination Committee and Chair of the I-PASS Consultation Program.



Amy J. Starmer, MD, MPH

Dr. Starmer is the Director of Primary Care Quality Improvement and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Starmer is a graduate of Haverford College and the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. She completed pediatric residency training at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, a fellowship in General Academic Pediatrics and Health Services Research at Boston Children’s Hospital, and received a Masters Degree from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2010. She joined Oregon Health and Science University as an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in May of 2011 as a participant in the OHSU Comparative Effectiveness K12 program before rejoining the faculty at Boston Children’s Hospital in February 2014. Dr. Starmer’s academic focus lies in the development of curricula and interventions to improve patient safety and provider communication with a specific interest in the study and implementation of strategies to improve handoffs of care. She is a past chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Section on Medical Students, Residents, and Fellowship Trainees and has held multiple committee, liaison, and leadership roles within the Academic Pediatric Association as well as the AAP. In 2011 Dr. Starmer received the Ray E. Helfer Award for Innovation in Medical Education Research. Dr. Starmer served as the Project Leader for the I-PASS Study and she currently serves as the Project Leader for the Society for Hospital Medicine I-PASS Mentored Implementation Project, as a member of the I-PASS Executive Council, as the chair of the Quality Improvement and Implementation Committee of the Patient and Family Centered I-PASS Study, and holds several additional leadership roles within the I-PASS Study Group.



Raj Srivastava, MD, FRCP(C), MPH

Dr. Srivastava is the Assistant Vice President of Research at Intermountain Healthcare and a Tenured Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Utah in the Division of Inpatient Medicine. He is a practicing hospitalist in the Division of Pediatric Inpatient Medicine at Primary Children’s Hospital (Intermountain Healthcare’s children hospital) in Salt Lake City. Dr. Srivastava went to medical school at the University of Toronto (class of ’94) and completed his housestaff training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto where he went on to complete an Associate Chief Residency. Following this, he completed a Fellowship in Health Services Research at Children’s Hospital, Boston, Harvard Medical School with a clinical focus in pediatric hospital medicine from 1998 – 2000. Dr. Srivastava has a system-wide role at Intermountain Healthcare that includes overseeing the Office of Research and working within the Institute for Health Care Deliver Research to design and conduct implementation studies within Intermountain Healthcare (across the spectrum of care). Dr. Srivastava was the 2013-2014 Australian-American Health Policy Fellow studying costs of hospital care as part of Australian Health Care Reform. Dr. Srivastava is the Chair of the only funded hospitalist network, Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings (PRIS) www.prisnetwork.org. PRIS is a > 100 hospital research and implementation network conducting several large multi-center studies that are important to the field of Hospital Medicine – including prioritizing high priority pediatric conditions that are costly, prevalent and demonstrate high inter-hospital variation in cost per admission; building data infrastructure for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER); performing pediatric CER studies (www.childrenshospitals.org/phisplus/index.html); and studying system-level interventions using quality improvement methods to improve patient safety (http://www.ipasshandoffstudy.com). Dr. Srivastava is a member of the I-PASS Executive Council, in addition to other leadership roles within the I-PASS Study Group.



Daniel C. West, MD

Dr. West is the Director of the Pediatric Residency Program, Vice-Chair for Education, and Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. West completed undergraduate degree and medical school training at the University of Florida, Pediatric Residency training at the University of California, San Francisco, and fellowship at Children's Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Harvard Medical School in Boston. He has obtained additional research and education training at the Schools of Medicine and Public Health at Harvard and the School of Education at Stanford. In his clinical work, Dr. West is a pediatric hematologist/oncologist and has over two decades of experience treating children, adolescents and young adults with a wide variety of hematologic and oncologic conditions with a special interest in bone sarcomas. In over 17 years as a residency program director, Dr. West has worked to develop a number of educational innovations that span the continuum of medical education. With expertise in assessment and measurement, his current research interests focus on understanding the relationship between measures of physician/resident skills and clinically important patient care outcomes. He has held numerous national leadership positions in pediatric graduate medical education including the Association of Pediatric Program Directors and the Pediatric Review Committee of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Dr. West has won numerous awards including election into Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha Omega Alpha, Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Award (ACGME), and election into the American Pediatric Society. Dr. West is a member of the I-PASS Study Group Executive Council, the Family-Centered I-PASS Coordinating Council, and Co-Chair of the Family-Centered I-PASS Scientific Oversight Committee.