Dr. Kanekal Gautham, MD, DM, MS, FAAP, a neonatologist, is the Chair of Pediatrics and the Pediatrician-in-Chief at Nemours Children’s Hospital, Orlando, FL, and a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine. He is also the Director of Research for Nemours Children’s Health, Central Florida. He previously served as Professor of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, and as Chief of Neonatology at Texas Children's Hospital, Houston, Texas. He is a Deputy Editor of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Safety, and a Senior Editor for the Neonatal Review Group of the Cochrane Collaboration, and the Editor in Charge of Diagnostic Test Accuracy reviews. He is an editor of a well-known textbook, Assisted Ventilation of the Neonate, editor of Clinical Guidelines in Neonatology, and editor of the neonatology section in Rudolph Textbook of Pediatrics. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Perinatology. After his fellowship in neonatology at the University of Vermont, he served as a faculty member there and was a postgraduate fellow at the Vermont Oxford Network. He has worked closely with the Vermont Oxford Network for many years, as a faculty member of the Vermont Oxford Network’s quality improvement collaborative, the Neonatal Intensive Care Quality (NICQ) project, and as an advisory board member for NICQ. He has set up and directed several educational courses on patient safety, on evidence-based medicine and on communication in healthcare. He was chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics program, Education in Quality Improvement for Pediatric Practice (EQIPP) for 13 years, and is now a member of the group managing this program.

He is a graduate of the Master’s Program at The Dartmouth Institute of Health Policy and Clinical Practice where his concentration was Continuous Quality Improvement in Healthcare.

He previously worked in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where he was faculty at The Dartmouth Institute, and at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and a neonatologist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. At Dartmouth-Hitchcock he served as the Medical Director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Program Director for the Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine fellowship, Associate Program Director and coach for the Leadership Preventive Medicine Residency, and member of the Clinical Ethics Committee.

His interests include patient safety, quality improvement, evidence-based practice, ethics, leadership, and physician resilience and burnout. He is the author of several peer reviewed scientific publications, Cochrane systematic reviews, and book chapters on these topics. A popular speaker and teacher, he has given numerous invited lectures and workshops on these topics.