Anne Hansen, MD

Biography:
Dr. Anne Hansen received her MD from Harvard Medical School and then went to Boston Children’s Hospital for her pediatric internship and residency. She stayed in Boston for her fellowship in Newborn Medicine at the combined program between Children’s, Beth Israel, and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals. She obtained her M.P.H. with a concentration in Clinical Effectiveness from Harvard School of Public Health. She joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 1996 and is currently an Associate Professor of Pediatrics. Dr. Anne Hansen has been the Medical Director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Boston Children’s Hospital since 2003. She has authored dozens of clinical guidelines, and is a chair or member of multiple unit based and hospital wide committees. She is a Fellow in the American Academy of Pediatrics. An acclaimed teacher, she is the recipient of the Merton Bernfield mentoring award, the Harvard Medical School Humanism Award, and the Tutor of the Year Award at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Hansen has published over 35 peer reviewed articles, 53 chapters and 8 books.

Research:
Dr. Hansen’s research focuses on improving the care of newborns seriously ill with medical and surgical conditions, medical device development, and global health. She has been working since 2010 in collaboration with the Rwanda Ministry of Health (MOH) and Partners In Health (PIH) to develop and implement national standards for newborn care. Recently, they have written a 2nd edition and conducted national trainings with nurses and doctors from all Rwandan provincial hospitals. She is currently working with OPENPediatrics, a free, open-access on-line medical education platform based at Boston Children’s Hospital, to make the Rwandan neonatal protocols, taught by Rwandan doctors and nurses, available as videos to pediatricians around the world. Working with the Rwanda MOH, PIH and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies, she has developed a simple, inexpensive, re-usable nonelectric infant warmer that has been tested successfully in Rwanda; She is now working to scale it nationally across Rwanda, as well as globally.

Closer to home, Dr Hansen is collaborating with engineers and industry to develop a Central Venous Catheter with decreased propensity for infection or clot formation. In collaboration with surgeons and industry, she has developed a novel, minimally invasive approach to esophageal growth induction for patients with long gap esophageal atresia. She has examined innovative approaches to the treatment of neonatal conditions including intraventricular urokinase for the prevention of post hemorrhagic hydrocephalus, once daily gentamicin dosing for infants, substitution of cord for infant blood in perinatal sepsis evaluations, and inhaled racemic epinephrine for the treatments of TTN. She was lead investigator in a study of Donation after Cardiac Death (DCD) in the NICU. She developed and implemented the first therapeutic hypothermia program in New England. She is a co-editor of the Manual of Neonatal Care, now in its 8th edition, and co-editor of the Manual of Neonatal Surgical Intensive care, now in its 3rd edition.