Dr. Meghan K. Meghpara

Dr. Julie Hoover-Fong is a Professor of Genetic Medicine and Pediatrics and Director of the Greenberg Center for Skeletal Dysplasias at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Hoover-Fong holds a bachelor’s degree in Human Nutrition from The Ohio State University, where she also completed her medical degree. She received her Ph.D. in the Graduate Training Program in Clinical Investigation at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Hoover-Fong completed a pediatric internship and residency at Washington University in St. Louis and a fellowship in medical genetics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She joined the Johns Hopkins University faculty in 2002 and progressed to Professor of Genetic Medicine and Pediatrics in 2019. She practices and oversees the clinical operations, research and educational ventures for the patients, families and healthcare providers served by the Greenberg Center. Her clinical team develops and improves diagnostic and treatment guidelines for comprehensive care of patients with all types of bone conditions including dwarfism, orofacial clefting, craniosynostosis and more. Dr. Hoover-Fong also mentors and teaches medical students, residents and genetic medicine trainees. As an active clinical researcher, Dr. Hoover-Fong is the Principal Investigator of multiple global clinical trials for achondroplasia, the first multi-center, investigator-initiated natural history study for achondroplasia, and multiple clinical studies for patients with orofacial clefting, hypophosphatasia and other conditions. She is also a co-investigator on the ELSI and Phenotype Review Committees for the Mendel Project, a whole exome sequencing venture to identify the genetic cause of Mendelian conditions. From an institutional service perspective, Dr. Hoover-Fong serves on the Johns Hopkins Associate Professor Promotions Committee and the Advisory Committee for the Graduate Training Program in Clinical Investigation. She serves on the Medical Advisory Board of the Little People of America, is a member of the Miller-Coulson Academy of Clinical Excellence at Johns Hopkins University and is a charter member of the International Skeletal Dysplasia Management Consortium, publishing best practice guidelines for patients with skeletal dysplasias. Dr. Hoover-Fong is highly rated in 26 conditions, according to our data. His clinical expertise encompasses Achondroplasia, Rhizomelic Syndrome, Spondyloepimetaphyseal Dysplasia Strudwick Type, Adenoidectomy, and Myringotomy. Dr. Hoover-Fong is board certified in American Board Of Medical Genetics And Genomics. Dr. Hoover-Fong is currently accepting new patients.

Catherine Chu is the director of the Division of Pediatric Neurology and the John M. Freeman Pediatric Epilepsy Center in the Johns Hopkins Department of Neurology, as well as the vice president of child neurology at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. As a child neurologist, epileptologist and clinical neurophysiologist, Dr. Chu cares for children diagnosed with epilepsy and disorders of the nervous system (neurophysiology). She specializes in electroencephalogram (also known as EEG) analysis, seizure localization, surgical planning and neuromodulation for adult and pediatric patients with difficult to control epilepsy. She is nationally and internationally recognized for her work identifying causes of and treatment options for cognitive dysfunction and seizures in epilepsy and neurodevelopmental disorders. Dr. Chu’s team specializes in identifying and developing tools to detect and understand brain rhythms that support complex cognitive functions throughout development, including how these rhythms are disrupted by seizures and neurodevelopmental disorders. Dr. Chu earned her medical degree and a master’s degree in social anthropology from Harvard University. She completed an internship in pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital, and then a residency in neurology and child neurology at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. After completing two fellowships at Massachusetts General, one in epilepsy and another in clinical neurophysiology, Dr. Chu earned a master’s degree in medical science, focused on clinical investigation, from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Chu is highly rated in 10 conditions, according to our data. Her clinical expertise encompasses Benign Rolandic Epilepsy, Epilepsy in Children, Seizures, Epilepsy, and Deep Brain Stimulation. Dr. Chu is board certified in American Board Of Psychiatry And Neurology. Dr. Chu is currently accepting new patients.

Dr. Christine Pratilas is a pediatric medical oncologist at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and Associate Professor of Oncology, Pediatrics & Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She joined the Hopkins pediatric sarcoma team in 2014. Dr. Pratilas received her undergraduate degree in Biology from Drew University in New Jersey and her medical degree from UMDNJ - Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (now Rutgers University), where she also completed her internship and residency from 1999 to 2002. From 2002 to 2005 she was a fellow in hematology and oncology in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) Department of Pediatrics, and in the Department of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at New York Weill Cornell Medical Center. She was a postdoctoral research fellow in Dr. Neal Rosen’s Molecular Oncogenesis Laboratory at MSKCC. From 2006 to 2014 she was attending in Pediatric Oncology at MSKCC, specializing in developmental therapeutics & sarcoma. She has been the director of the pediatric sarcoma program at Hopkins since 2018. Dr. Pratilas focuses her research on cancer-associated pathways and signal transduction, which involves figuring out how a cell’s internal molecular pathways work, and how those pathways can be molecularly controlled. This knowledge is the basis for developing promising new molecularly targeted cancer therapies, which is the focus of Dr. Pratilas’s research. Among her important scientific contributions is advancing our understanding of how certain proteins that can be mutated in cancer, known as RAF kinases (specifically BRAF), affect a cancer cell’s behavior. The research in Dr. Pratilas' laboratory is focused on RAS signal transduction pathways, concentrating on pediatric sarcomas such as rhabdomyosarcoma and malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors, in order to develop novel therapeutics for children with these tumors. Dr. Pratilas is highly rated in 16 conditions, according to our data. Her clinical expertise encompasses Malignant Peripheral Nerve Sheath Tumor, Fibrosarcoma, Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1), Neurofibromatosis, and Osteotomy. Dr. Pratilas is board certified in American Board Of Pediatrics. Dr. Pratilas is currently accepting new patients.