Claudia R. Morris MD

Professor of Pediatrics & Emergency Medicine,

Wilbur Fisk Glenn Jr. Distinguished Faculty Chair for Clinical & Translational Research

Research Director, Pediatric Emergency Medicine

Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, USA; Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta

Nodal Co-PI, PECARN SPARC node (San Francisco, Providence, Atlanta Research Collaborative)

Dr. Claudia R. Morris, MD is a Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and holds the Wilbur Fisk Glenn Jr. Distinguished Faculty Chair for Clinical & Translational Research. She is the Director of Research for the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine (PEM) at Emory and is also the Director of the Emory+Children’s Center for Clinical & Translational Research. Clinically she is an attending physician in PEM at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. She received her medical degree from Eastern Virginia Medical School, and completed her residency training in Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Oakland (now UCSF-Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland). She went on to do a chief resident year, as well as a fellowship in PEM at Children’s Hospital Oakland, and remained on as faculty until her relocation to Emory in 2012. Dr. Morris has been actively involved in clinical and translational research for over 25 years. She has a successful track record of extramural funding, clinical trials leadership, high-impact publications and mentorship of fellows, medical students and junior faculty. She was an elected executive committee member of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Section on Integrative Medicine, and has been a champion for integrative approaches to acute pain management, particularly in the emergency department setting. She also provides leadership within the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) as the Nodal Principal Investigator for the SPARC node (San Francisco-Oakland, Atlanta, Providence Research Collaborative). Dr. Morris is a dedicated clinical trialist, best known for her research in SCD. She discovered that an arginine deficiency in SCD is the consequence of hemolysis, a process in which red blood cells rupture and release their contents into the blood stream (Morris et al, JAMA 2005). She has demonstrated that low arginine bioavailability is associated with adverse clinical outcomes in SCD including pain, pulmonary hypertension and mortality risk that may be attenuated by arginine replacement therapy.  She is also a co-editor for UpToDate on Topics related to SCD pain and fever. She is currently a K24 scholar, awarded a 10-year grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) to mentor the next generation of physician scientists with a focus on arginine therapy.  She is also an advocate for precision nutrition that targets distinctive nutritional requirements that arise from acute and chronic diseases.