Dr. Lisanti has spent her 23-year nursing career caring for infants and children with congenital heart disease (CHD) and their families. Aligning with the mission of Clinical Futures at CHOP, Dr. Lisanti’s research supports the overall health and wellbeing of infants and children born with CHD and their families. Her program of research is focused on supporting family-centered developmental care for this fragile patient population. Specifically, her research has highlighted the importance of enhancing the role of parents through family-centered, developmentally supportive interventions in the pediatric cardiac intensive care unit (PCICU) to mitigate parent mental health symptoms, reduce infant stress, and optimize infant neurodevelopment in CHD. Dr. Lisanti created and described the PCICU Parental Stress Model and the Parent Stress and Resilience in Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) models. These were the first models describing parent stress and mental health in CHD and empirically tested. She is a recognized leader within pediatric cardiovascular nursing and her work on family centered, developmentally supportive care of infants with CHD has been cited in peer-reviewed journals from around the world. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the research track at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, with a joint appointment in the Research Institute at CHOP. Dr. Lisanti’s future goals are to conduct clinical, comparative effectiveness, or hybrid implementation-effectiveness trials testing nurse-driven or novel interdisciplinary family-centered care interventions to improve outcomes of infants and children with CHD and their families.

Contact Dr. Lisanti at lisanti@chop.edu.