Title:Pediatrics team optimizes collaboration across university

In an academic setting—especially at a university like Georgetown with its deep and broad disciplines in law, public policy, health care, nursing, medicine, and business—it’s easy to become hyper focused or even siloed, unaware of the common thread weaving among colleagues working within a few neighborhood blocks. That’s exactly the experience for many researchers at Georgetown who recognize that addressing the most difficult challenges facing children today requires a multi-pronged, multidisciplinary approach to finding solutions.

With the goal of leveraging the many pockets of work involving the betterment of children across the university, Michael Donnelly, MD, chair of pediatrics, has set out to create a repository—a complete and robust catalogue of the Georgetown projects and programs involving work around children. This new initiative will be chaired by pediatrics professor Phyllis Magrab, PhD, director of the Georgetown University Center for Child and Human Development.

Under Magrab’s leadership, the steering group met in October to name it the Georgetown Collaborative for Research and Education to Advance Children’s Health, or GC-REACH.

“By putting people together who work on similar issues, we create a synergy that allows us to apply for grants and start projects that we never would have attempted before,” says Donnelly. “I’m looking forward to us coming together in a more multidisciplinary way to focus on the important work of advancing children’s health.”

This story originally appeared as a sidebar in The Impact of COVID-19 on the Young.