Steve Abman (SA): We are pleased to welcome you to our joint American Pediatric Society (APS) and Society for Pediatric Research (SPR) Virtual Chat Series on the challenges of academic medicine. Past sessions have included conversations on many aspects of academic medicine, including issues of career development, navigating career transitions, the “pipeline,” valuing and achieving diversity in academic medicine, and many other topics. Today’s session is entitled “Developing careers and strategies to promote advocacy and child health.” As pediatricians, we clearly recognize the vital importance of advocacy to optimize the health and well-being of our children and their families. Success within many roles, achievements and activities of academic medicine, as related to clinical care, research, training, community engagement, and public policy are all strongly dependent on successful advocacy. This is especially true in this time of so many overlapping challenges, including COVID, health disparities, racism and social injustice, and many issues regarding health-care delivery.

As advocacy has become so prominent in pediatrics, strategies regarding how to best train pediatricians to develop advocacy skills, expertise in this area as a career path, and leadership opportunities, reflecting our values of diversity and inclusion, are under extensive planning and implementation. Today, we will hear from three outstanding experts and leaders in advocacy during today’s session, whose extraordinary careers illustrate a full range of advocacy issues throughout pediatrics. It is my pleasure to briefly introduce our panelists. The first is my good friend and colleague, Dr. Jon Davis, who has had an extraordinary career wearing many hats as scholar, scientist, clinician, academic leader, and advocate. Dr. Davis is the Vice-Chair of Pediatrics and Chief of Newborn Medicine at Tufts University. At Tufts, he serves in many additional leadership roles, which include Associate Director of the Tufts CTSI and Director of the Tufts Trial Innovation Network Center. He is also the Chair of the Neonatal Advisory Committee in the Office of the Commissioner of the FDA. He is Director of the International Neonatal Consortium (INC), which works in partnership with the FDA, NIH, European Medicines Agency (EMA), Critical Path Institute and others to coordinate activities of these diverse groups to improve the development of novel therapies for neonatal diseases. Jon has had major impact in many areas and has been especially successful linking academics with government agencies such as the NIH and FDA. Dr. Davis also serves on numerous