Jeffrey R. Kaiser, MD

About Me

I am the chief of the Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine and the inaugural holder of the Kenneth V. and Eleanor M. Hatt Professorship of Neonatal Medicine at Penn State Health Children’s Hospital. I joined Penn State College of Medicine in 2017 as a professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Obstetrics and Gynecology. Previously, I was a faculty member at Texas Children's Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and, prior to that, Arkansas Children's Hospital/University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. I have a Master’s degree in the sociology of education.

I was involved in the planning of the Penn State Health Children’s Hospital 56-bed, level IV NICU that opened in 2020 and led the development of the Small Baby Unit. I also helped establish the Nursing Delivery Room Resuscitation team. Since coming to Penn State Health, the Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine has increased in size from 7 to 13 neonatologists, and now includes three PhDs.

I was previously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and studied physiological disturbances associated with neonatal intraventricular hemorrhage. I was the first investigator to show that progressively increasing partial pressure of carbon dioxide is associated with progressively impaired cerebral autoregulation in sick, premature newborns. I was also the site principal investigator for several neonatal neurology NIH multicenter trials and the CoolCap Trial for the Treatment of Perinatal Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy. Study. My current research focuses on neonatal hypoglycemia; we showed that transient neonatal hypoglycemia was associated with lower test scores in reading and math in 10-year-olds. Moreover, we reported that infants with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy with early hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia had worse outcomes compared to those with normoglycemia. I am also funded by the Gerber Foundation to study the use of continuous glucose monitoring in at-risk newborns. I also hold a patent for a neonatal BiliSuit, a light-emitting garment designed to treat neonatal jaundice. I have mentored more than 40 trainees and junior faculty, am a current mentor on three NIH K23 grants, and nine of my mentees have secured NIH funding. I have published more than 80 journal articles and book chapters.