Stansfield elected president of Southern Society for Pediatric Research

Dr. Brian K. Stansfield, a neonatologist and member of the Vascular Biology Center at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, has been elected president of the Southern Society for Pediatric Research.

Stansfield, who is a 2004 MCG graduate, will lead the group through 2020 and will organize its annual meeting in New Orleans next year. The society was organized in 1960 as a forum for pediatric investigators from the South to present their work and to support career development and leadership in academic pediatrics. Its primary mission is to support and grow the next generation of academic pediatricians and to propel them to national and international recognition.

Prior to being elected president, Stansfield served the society as council member from 2016-18 and an institutional representative from 2014-16. He received the group’s Young Faculty Award in 2017 and 2018.

In 2016, he received its Clinical Science Young Investigator Award, recognizing exemplary clinical research by an early career investigator, for his studies identifying risks of metabolic disease and adiposity associated with being a low- or high-birthweight baby. His studies of 575 adolescents showed that either extreme appears to increase the risk of visceral adiposity — fat around organs in the abdominal cavity — and increase the risk of heart disease and insulin resistance.

He also received the society’s 2015 Basic Science Young Investigator Award for his work to better understand formation of excessive scar tissue that thickens blood vessel walls in the rare genetic disorder neurofibromatosis. Stansfield is the only recipient of both Young Investigator Awards in the society’s 60-year history.

An honored educator, Stansfield received a 2015 MCG Exemplary Teaching Award and the Outstanding Young Clinical Science Faculty Award from MCG’s Faculty Senate in 2018. In 2016, he was honored with a Jag20 award, given to 20 emerging Augusta University alumni leaders under age 40 who have made significant impact in their career, community and university.

Stansfield completed his pediatric residency at MCG and the Children’s Hospital of Georgia and a fellowship in neonatal-perinatal medicine and a National Institutes of Health Pediatric Scientist Development Program fellowship, both at Indiana University School of Medicine. He returned to MCG in 2013.