Brynne Sullivan, MD, MSc

Brynne Sullivan, MD
CAMA Director
Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Neonatology

Brynne Sullivan is a neonatologist and physician-scientist. She received her BS in Biology from Washington and Lee University and her MD from the University of Virginia. She has lived in Charlottesville since medical school, completing her pediatric residency and neonatology fellowship at UVA.

Dr. Sullivan sees patients in the UVA Children’s NICU and has dedicated her research career to studying the use of bedside monitoring data to improve neonatal outcomes. Through her studies of the heart rate characteristics index, or HeRO score, and cardiorespiratory monitoring data, she found that mathematical analyses of continuous cardiorespiratory monitoring detect signatures of illness due to sepsis in premature infants. Her research has been funded by foundation grants, the integrated Translational Health Research Institute of Virginia (iTHRIV), and the NIH with NICHD K23 and NIBIB R18 awards. Randall Moorman, director of CAMA and cofounder of HeRO, served as her primary K23 mentor.

Among Sullivan’s primary research experiences was her work on cardiorespiratory signatures of illness due to sepsis in very low birth rate (VLBW) infants. She has also led and contributed to multiple analyses of cardiorespiratory data by helping develop algorithms that predict multiple adverse outcomes in preterm infants. She leads a 4-NICU collaboration that has built a robust multicenter database, which has fueled numerous studies combining physiologic and demographic data for outcome risk prediction in representative cohorts with external validation. In addition to her many publications on predictive monitoring and physiology in neonates, Sullivan has mentored and collaborated with numerous trainees and medical students on clinical research.

At CAMA, Sullivan analyzes, integrates, and displays clinical markers, biomarkers, and physiomarkers by applying predictive modeling for the early detection and treatment of neonatal sepsis. She works with others in the research group on time series analytics, machine learning models, and implementing the FAIR data pipeline for NICU data. She is a primary investigator on a team of neonatal researchers at UVA, University of Alabama-Birmingham, and Washington University in St. Louis, studying cardiorespiratory signatures in Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome (NOWS).

Projects

Predictive Monitoring for Sepsis and NEC Neighborhood Deprivation and Association With Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Mortality and Morbidity for Extremely Premature Infants Pulse Oximetry Warning Score for Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome- POWS for NOWS Fecal biomarkers of cholestasis Analysis of Respiratory Kinematics (ARK) for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Publications News