Brenda Poindexter MD
Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics
James W. Riley Hospital for Children
M.D., Medical College of Ohio, 1990
Internship and Residency, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center,
Ohio, 1990 – 1993
Fellowship, Indiana University School of Medicine, 1994 – 1997
Dr. Poindexter is the director of Clinical Research for the Section of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at Indiana University. After completing her residency in Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children's, she came to Indiana for fellowship training and also a masters degree in clinical research. Her primary areas of interest include neonatal nutrition and metabolism, particularly the effect of early parenteral nutrition on growth and neurodevelopment. She is the Principal Investigator for the NICHD Neonatal Research Network (NRN). The NRN is comprised of 16 academic centers funded by the NIH to conduct studies to investigate the safety and efficacy of treatment and management strategies to care for newborn infants. Recent and ongoing clinical trials conducted by the NRN include aggressive vs. conservative phototherapy, the Surfactant Positive Airway Pressure & Pulse Oximetry Trial, Whole Body Hypothermia for Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy, and a Randomized Trial of Laparotomy vs. Drainage as the initial surgical therapy for ELBW infants with NEC or Isolated Intestinal Perforation (for complete listing go to https://neonatal.rti.org). The Network also evaluates morbidity and mortality among VLBW infants with a prospective observational database and also conducts comprehensive neurodevelopmental follow-up of extremely premature infants. In addition to the NRN studies, Dr. Poindexter also has funding for studies evaluating Fluconazole prophylaxis for the prevention of candidiasis in infants < 750 grams, pharmacokinetics of Meropenem and Piperacillin-tazobactam in neonates, Genomics and angiogenesis in the pathogenesis of BPD, and gene targets for IVH.
