Katharine Press Callahan, MD, MSME, is a neonatologist and ethicist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She is also an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She joined Clinical Futures as a core faculty member in 2026. Her research aims to improve the ways in which we manage genetic information, and other complex medical information, to maximize benefit for children and their families.

Dr. Callahan’s research focuses on how neonatologists and parents use genetic information to make medical decisions and conceptualize patients’ futures. This focus emerges at the intersection of her work as a neonatologist and ethicist and her longstanding interest in the integration of genetic information into complex medical practice. In residency, she began to explore the limitations of genetic prognostication through the lens of Down syndrome. Working as a neonatologist, she has witnessed both the benefits and potential confusion and harms that can result from genetic testing in this context. She has leveraged these experiences to research agenda aimed at maximizing benefit and minimizing harm of complex genetic information in the neonatal intensive care unit.

To set the groundwork for this pursuit, she conducted a split sample psychological experiment demonstrating that neonatologists applied genetic findings, including uncertain genetic findings or those heralding neurodevelopmental impairment, in biased and problematic ways. She has quantified variation in genetic testing between different children’s hospitals, revealing dramatic and increasing variation. This reflects lack of consensus about how to harness evolving genetic technologies. Dr. Callahan completed a systematic review of clinical utility measures neonatal genomics. This work documented shortcomings of current measures that she is working to mitigate in developing a new metric, currently under study. Her current work, supported by a K01 award from the NHGRI, focuses on managing the uncertainty of genetic information to make it most useful to neonatologists and parents.

Dr. Callahan has also explored the parent-perceived value of other types of medical information. She recently completed a study ranking the outcomes of chronic lung disease that are most important to parents and is continuing this work to develop parent-important pulmonary metrics. Most broadly, she hopes her work will align complex medical information with outcomes that are meaningful to patients and their families.