Melania Bembea, MD

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Dr. Melania M. Bembea is Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Pediatrics. Dr. Bembea came to Johns Hopkins as a Pediatric Critical Care Medicine fellow in 2006 and joined the PICU faculty as an attending physician in 2009. Beginning in 2015, she became Director of the Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) Program in the Children’s Center. Approximately 25–38 neonates, infants, and children are treated with ECMO each year at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Bembea oversees education, quality improvement, and administrative aspects of the program. She also ensures that the program meets quality standards that have earned it recognition from the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO) as a Center of Excellence - Gold Level since 2011, and the highest level of recognition, Platinum Level, in 2020. Dr. Bembea finds it extremely rewarding to take care of children and their families and values the tremendous amount of collaboration that occurs between the various disciplines that work together toward a common goal. In addition to her clinical responsibilities, Dr. Bembea has an active lab studying brain injury biomarkers in critically ill children. The goal of her research is to improve neurologic monitoring in the pediatric intensive care unit and neurologic outcomes following critical illness in children.