I grew up in rural India, where I had limited access to education. However, I have always had dreams of working with newborn babies. After receiving medical education and training at Seth G.S. Medical College, Mumbai, India, I moved first to Sydney, Australia, and then to the United States in 2011 to be trained in Neonatology. I completed my residency in Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and then a fellowship in neonatology at the East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina.

During neonatology fellowship, my first research project was focused on acute kidney injury in murine necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC).1,2 My mentor, Dr. Prem Shekhawat, taught me scientific thinking and basic laboratory procedures. He introduced me to Dr. Akhil Maheshwari to pursue further NEC research.3 I also got the opportunity to serve as the President of the first Junior Section of the Society for Pediatric Research in 2013–2014. I then joined the University of Mississippi in 2016 as an Assistant Professor in Pediatrics/Neonatology. I have been working under the mentorship of Dr. Maheshwari, who has been teaching me to focus on the clinical outcomes, think outside the box, have self-belief and big dreams, and work on projects that make a real difference. His belief in high-quality research has motivated me.

Surgical NEC has always fascinated me, and I have felt that the current surgical practice follows a very conservative approach and aims to preserve bowel that has borderline/unclear viability; there may be a need for on-site histopathological evaluation. In my recent projects, I have investigated ways to evaluate the tissue viability in the bowel loops that are resected for NEC and correlated these with the clinical outcomes. We reported that infants with some necrosis in the margins of the resected bowel had higher mortality and longer hospital stay than those who had complete resections with clean margins. Currently, we are investigating the impact of early reparative changes in the bowel loops resected for surgical NEC on the clinical outcomes.4,5

I have learned that self-belief, critical thinking, passion, hard work, collaboration, good mentorship, and perseverance are the most important factors to become a successful physician-scientist. Work-life balance is also very important; I want to thank my parents and my wife, Padma Garg, who is a Pediatric Intensivist and has supported me throughout my life and academic journey.