Study Personnel

About the PICFLU Network

In 2002, Dr. Adrienne Randolph founded the Pediatric Acute Lung Injury and Sepsis Investigator’s (PALISI) Network,
a consortium of clinical researchers who work in pediatric intensive care units across over 80 institutions in the U.S. and Canada. Influenza infection becomes life-threatening when it causes severe injury to the lung or when the infection impairs the function of other vital organs causing overwhelming sepsis.  Led by Dr. Randolph, some sites in the PALISI Network were funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Public Health Genomics Division in 2008 to study how a person’s genes influence their response to influenza virus, including why some children and young adults get very sick when most others don’t. We called it the Pediatric Intensive Care Influenza (PICFLU) Study.

In the late spring and summer of 2009, while we were enrolling patients, the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic spread rapidly across the United States. We received a five-year grant to continue studying the immune response to influenza infection from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). We also received funding from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to partner with the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome Network (ARDSNet) to collect data during the pandemic and study its effect on patients and clinical resources.

The PICFLU Network has grown and we have performed many studies which are described on our website. We are now part of the Centers of Excellence of Influenza Research and Response (CEIRR) Network Center Influenza Disease and Emergence Research (CIDER) consortium funded by the NIAID.

Adrienne Randolph, MD, MSc

PICFLU Network Principal Investigator

Dr. Randolph is a pediatric critical care physician at Boston Children’s Hospital and Professor of Anaesthesia and Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She is the founder and first Chair of the PALISI Network. In 2007, she founded the PICFLU Network with over 30 PALISI sites that were interested in studying influenza and other severe emerging pathogens.

Margaret Newhams, MPH

Clinical Research Manager

Tanya Novak, PhD

Clinical Laboratory Manager
Instructor, Harvard Medical School

Contact Us

Dr. Adrienne Randolph
Critical Care, Bader 634 
Boston Children's Hospital
300 Longwood Avenue
Boston, MA 02115 
adrienne.randolph@childrens.harvard.edu