Namasivayam Ambalavanan, M.D., professor in the Department of Pediatrics and co-director of the Division of Neonatology, is the senior faculty winner of the 2020 Dean’s Excellence Award in Research. After completing his medical education in India, Ambalavanan came to UAB for both his pediatric residency and neonatology fellowship. Upon completing his training, Ambalavanan stayed on at UAB as a faculty member in the Division of Neonatology. He was named co-director of the Division of Neonatology in 2008, and the program director for the Neonatology Fellowship Program in 2009. He serves as the director for Neonatal Research in the Department of Pediatrics and the Translational Research in Normal and Discorded Development (TReNDD) program.
Ambalavanan is a distinguished researcher. He has worked tirelessly to improve the research output in the Division of Neonatology, and has been instrumental in developing UAB’s pioneering research in organ injury and repair during human development. He leads a laboratory with a research focus on mechanisms underlying normal lung development and lung injury. Just a few of his recent research accomplishments is serving as the PI of one of four research centers in the LungMAP project, funded by a U01 grant. The project created a repository of young human tissue and developed a comprehensive ontology that incorporates the latest findings of the consortium. He is also PI of one of five research centers in the NIH funded U01 Pre-VENT project, which aims to develop mathematical models and understanding of how abnormal breathing is associated with poor-outcomes. Over his career he has had 297 peer-reviewed publications, with several being published in some of the top academic journals in the field including The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and JAMA. He has published 98 manuscripts as first or senior author and has an h-index of 49 (Scopus).
“Dr. Ambalavanan is a great asset to the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a valuable leader in the novel and groundbreaking research that has come to define it,” said Wally Carlo, M.D., co-director of the Division of Neonatology. “Dr. Ambalavanan is a superb director, mentor, and professor and deserves to be rewarded for his continued research excellence.”