Prestigious NIHR Research Professorship for Imperial child health expert

A leading expert in paediatric critical care has been awarded an NIHR Professorship to advance innovation and improve outcomes for children’s health.

Professor Padmanabhan Ramnarayan, Professor of Paediatric Critical Care in the Department of Surgery and Cancer and Honorary Consultant in Paediatric Intensive Care at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has been awarded a prestigious National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Research Professorship.

The NIHR Research Professorship is one of the most competitive and high-profile research awards in the UK, designed to support exceptional academics to translate their discoveries into better treatments and care for patients. Fewer than five are awarded nationally each year.

Professor Ramnarayan will use the five-year award to lead a major research programme called PATCH – A Personalised Approach to breathing support Treatments in sick CHildren. The project aims to transform how doctors provide breathing support for critically ill children in intensive care, generating evidence that will directly improve ventilation practices across the NHS and beyond.

Personalised ventilation care for the sickest children

Each year, nearly 15,000 children in the UK require ventilation in paediatric intensive care units. The sickest among them face a 1 in 5 risk of death and often spend several days on a ventilator. Despite this, research on the best ways to support children’s breathing remains limited, and conventional trials often test ‘one-size-fits-all’ treatments. This makes it difficult to apply findings to individual children, who vary widely in age, illness and how they respond to treatments.

Professor Ramnarayan’s PATCH programme seeks to address this by taking a precision medicine approach to ventilation care.

The project will bring together clinicians, data scientists and statisticians to:

• Identify blood protein patterns that predict which children will respond best to certain treatments
• Use bedside lung ultrasound scans to guide gentler, personalised ventilation techniques
• Develop artificial intelligence tools that learn from real patient data to help clinicians decide when and how to safely remove a child from a ventilator.

Promising findings will be tested through PIVOTAL – a Paediatric Intensive Care Adaptive Platform Trial – which allows multiple treatments to be evaluated simultaneously, speeding up the process of finding what works best for each child.

A key feature of PATCH is its child- and family-centred approach. Parents and former patients will sit on a dedicated steering group to help shape the research throughout.

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Reacting to his award, Professor Ramnarayan said: “I am absolutely delighted to receive this prestigious NIHR Research Professorship. This award represents an incredible opportunity to build a world-class interdisciplinary research team focused on advancing personalised approaches to children's ventilation. Our goal is to improve outcomes and experiences for critically unwell children and their families – both across the NHS and on a global scale.”

Building on a distinguished career

Professor Ramnarayan is Deputy Director of the Imperial Centre for Paediatrics and Child Health (PaeCH), Lead for the NIHR Incubator for Paediatric Critical Care, and Chair of the UK Paediatric Critical Care Society Study Group.

"Our goal is to improve outcomes and experiences for critically unwell children and their families – both across the NHS and on a global scale.”  Professor Padmanabhan Ramnarayan

His research interests span pragmatic clinical trials, critical care epidemiology, novel biomarkers for infection, and artificial intelligence to improve decision-making in critically ill children.

After completing his medical degree in India, he trained in paediatrics and intensive care in London and spent 16 years at Great Ormond Street Hospital before joining Imperial College London in 2021 as a clinical academic, working within Professor Anthony Gordon's Emergency and Critical Care research group.