On January 1, 2019, Barbara Warner, MD, MS, transitioned to chief of newborn medicine. Dr. Warner succeeds F. Sessions Cole, MD, after a thirty-three year-long dedication to excellence in clinical care, education and research. Dr. Cole now serves as the interim director of allergy, immunology and pulmonary medicine.
Dr. Warner is a professor of pediatrics within the division of newborn medicine, associate director of the newborn fellowship program and co-director of the Washington University Fetal Care Center. She earned a Master of Science degree in epidemiology from the University of Massachusetts before entering medical school at the University of Cincinnati. She completed her training in general pediatrics and neonatology at Cincinnati Children’s Medical Center, and remained on as a William Cooper Procter Research Scholar, eventually joining the faculty in the division of neonatology and pulmonary biology. While on faculty, Barb served as the medical director of the TriHealth nurseries, as well as director of their transport and nurse practitioner program. Her involvement in fetal care began in Cincinnati, and she now serves on the North American Fetal Therapy Network steering and scientific oversight committees.
In 2007, Dr. Warner joined the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. She became involved in the Human Microbiome Project as co-investigator examining the role of the preterm microbiome in NEC. Her research focus has been more broadly on the role of the gut microbiome in infant health and disease, for which she has been funded through the NIH and private foundations. Publications with her collaborative team encompass antibiotic resistance, gut microbial contribution to late onset infections and necrotizing enterocolitis, as well as normal determinants of gut microbial development.
Dr. Warner will continue to oversee the expansion of the NICU services at Children’s, and will be charged with expanding the St. Louis Children’s and Washington University School of Medicine neonatal network, which currently includes four other BJC hospitals (Missouri Baptist, Progress West, Belleville and Shiloh). She will also help expand the Fetal Care Center as well as enhance the neonatal-perinatal fellowship program along with co-directors Jennifer Wambach, MD, and Misty Good, MD, M.S.
Dr. Warner also has plans to further develop neonatal telemedicine and expand the division’s research base in both laboratory-based and clinical initiatives.
