President’s Address: Your Network is Your Net Worth: Membership in Professional Organizations Helps Innovate and Saves Lives (M10)

Dr. Gura is the manager for Pharmacy Research Programs and a member of the Clinical Nutrition Service in the Division of GI/Nutrition at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). She is also a member of BCH’s Center for Advanced Intestinal Rehabilitation and the Home PN Program. She serves on the faculty at Harvard Medical School as an assistant professor of pediatrics and is a member of the school’s Division of Nutrition. In addition, Dr. Gura is an adjunct faculty member at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health.

A native New Englander, Dr. Gura received her BS and PharmD degrees with honors from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. From 1982 to 1984, she honed her interest in nutrition as a clinical pharmacist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. In 1984, she returned to Boston and joined the pharmacy staff at BCH. Shortly thereafter, she became a part of the Clinical Nutrition Service and completed a mini nutrition fellowship at the University of Florida. Dr. Gura was one of the first board-certified nutrition support pharmacists in Boston.

Dr. Gura, along with her research collaborator of over two decades, Mark Puder, MD, PhD, solved one of the most recalcitrant problems associated with the use of parenteral nutrition when they discovered that lipid injectable emulsions could be used to treat intestinal failure-associated liver disease (IFALD) in children under four. Because of her life-saving research, fish oil is now globally used to treat IFALD.

She has written more than 200 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters on intestinal failure-associated liver disease, intravenous lipid emulsions, compounding of sterile products, and the use of parenteral nutrition in the neonate.