Contact
Email: ebandstr@miami.edu
Roles
Professor of Clinical
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Biography
Dr. Emmalee S. Bandstra is an Emerita Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Neonatology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and Attending Neonatologist in the UM-affiliated Jackson Memorial Hospital-Holtz Children’s Hospital and Jackson North Neonatal Intensive Care Units.
Dr. Bandstra earned her medical degree and completed postgraduate residency and fellowship training at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is board-certified in Pediatrics and Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine and a member of the American Pediatric Society and the Society for Pediatric Research. She also served as President of the Southern Society for Pediatric Research (SSPR) and the Florida Society of Neonatal Perinatology and was honored with the SSPR Founder’s Award and the Micah E. Batchelor Award for Excellence in Clinical Research.
Over the course of her neonatology career, Dr. Bandstra has trained and mentored over one hundred fellows in neonatology as well as a myriad of pediatric and medicine-pediatric residents, medical students, and undergraduates. She has also mentored or co-mentored numerous junior faculty members, an NIH K01 awardee, NIH-sponsored pediatric psychology fellows, and doctoral candidates in various disciplines.
In the late 1980s, during the nation’s cocaine epidemic, Dr. Bandstra founded the Miami Perinatal Chemical Addiction Research and Education (CARE) Program to conduct and lead multidisciplinary clinical research on prenatal exposure to substances of abuse and provide interdisciplinary, family-centered services for affected infants and their mothers and caregivers. She was Principal Investigator (PI) on a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) NIH R01 award to conduct a longitudinal study entitled “Neurodevelopmental Outcome of In Utero Cocaine Exposure”, also known as the Miami Prenatal Cocaine Study (MPCS). From this study, Dr. Bandstra and her co-investigators published important findings from one of the nation’s largest single-site cohorts of prenatally cocaine-exposed and non-exposed infants followed from birth through late adolescence. She also directed the University of Miami NIH Specialized Center on Research (SCOR) funded by the Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) and was PI on a SCOR project which supported the late adolescent phase of the MPCS. With Batchelor Foundation support, Dr. Bandstra and Dr. Pankaj Agrawal, Director of the Division of Neonatology, and their co-investigators are exploring the potential role of epigenetics in outcomes observed in the longitudinal MPCS cohort.
In addition to clinical research, Dr. Bandstra, in collaboration with her mentees and Pediatric Psychology co-investigators, Dr. Connie Morrow and Dr. Elana Mansoor, established and sustained a robust platform of successful state-of-the-art home-based and community-based prevention-intervention services for infants and young children and their families at risk due to parental substance abuse and other psychosocial risk factors. Community partnerships and funding from multiple federal, state, and local agencies and foundations continue to support these endeavors which have served thousands of families in Miami-Dade County. -
Education & Training
Education
Post Graduate Training
Licensures and Certifications
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Honors & Awards
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Research Interests
Dr. Bandstra's research focuses on the neurodevelopmental complications resulting from in utero drug exposures, as well as the impact of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) on infants. She examines the long-term effects of prenatal substance use on brain development and strives to improve outcomes for affected newborns. -
Publications
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