A Foundation for Pediatric Progress: Alison Cernich, Ph.D., Builds Shriners Children's Newest Research Institute

Right now, at Science Square in Atlanta, teams are assembling to build out two and a half floors that will eventually hold 150,000 square feet of laboratory space for Shriners Children’s Research Institute, the first building in the international nonprofit healthcare system built solely for research. Alison Cernich, Ph.D., is the person tasked with filling it, and she is doing so from a standing start most research leaders never get.

Dr. Cernich spent more than a decade at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), most recently as acting director and deputy director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, where she oversaw a $1.75 billion budget and roughly 1,800 employees. In February, she left that post to become the first director of the Research Institute.

"The reason I decided to leave was actually the opportunity itself because Shriners Children's had made a significant commitment to research already across their system," Dr. Cernich said. “And with the investment in the new institute in Atlanta, we're really extending what they already had into a concentrated building that focuses solely on research with the intent to impact the kids that they serve and drive innovation for pediatric healthcare.”

Before she became a research administrator, Dr. Cernich was a clinician. She trained as a clinical neuropsychologist focused on traumatic brain injury, earned a Ph.D. from Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey and treated patients at the VA Maryland Health Care System before her career pulled her into leadership roles at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Defense and eventually NIH. That clinical background, she said, is still the lens she uses to think about how research should move.

"Often, the research we did in my program was tied to the practice we were engaged in," Dr. Cernich said. "In the clinic I ran, we used data a great deal to either understand the patterns of patients to better our approaches to diagnosis or to think through various suggestions we could make with respect to their care."

For now, Dr. Cernich is splitting her attention between two very different jobs: building and recruiting. Construction on the Research Institute will run through 2027, and in the meantime, she's already planning how to staff the labs.

"While we're building, I want to recruit the scientists that will fill that building when we're ready to operate," she said. "We'll probably be going out with a major announcement about recruiting scientific staff in late summer or early fall."

The recruiting push won't stop at scientists in white lab coats. Dr. Cernich is also building out the computational and data infrastructure the new hires will need, an investment she sees as an extension of Shriners Children’s long history of using patient data to guide its research.

Part of what drew Dr. Cernich to Atlanta was already sitting next door. Shriners Children's researchers have collaborated with the Georgia Institute of Technology since 2019 through the university's Pediatric Innovation Network, a partnership that has already yielded more than two dozen joint projects, among them robotic exoskeletons for children with cerebral palsy and wearable sensors that track sleep problems in kids with cleft lip and palate.

"They also have a number of faculty that are currently collaborating with Shriners on research programs," Dr. Cernich said. "We are working with them to strengthen our existing partnership."

Georgia Tech, she made clear, is just the beginning. The Atlanta research environment is “incredibly rich,” she said, and the Research Institute is developing relationships with other state, private and nonprofit organizations that are aligned with the mission.

Dr. Cernich has built organizations before. Earlier in her career, she led the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research and served as deputy director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, restructuring entire divisions and creating new offices along the way.

"I think what I learned primarily from our intramural community was that you could have an organizational structure that served the science, but that you also could have collaborative communities that were stood up to help people work across different scientific areas to get to a scientific goal," she said. "And those shared interests would often bring together disciplines in a way that moved the work farther faster."

Her time alongside the disability research community taught her something else: Who gets a seat at the table matters as much as the org chart itself.

"A motto of the disability community is 'nothing about us without us,'" she said. "And I think that very much translates to how we work with these children and their families and the care team that's around them."

That principle, applied to conditions like cleft lip and palate, scoliosis, spinal cord injury, burns and cerebral palsy, is where Dr. Cernich sees the institute's biggest opening, she said. Basic questions about diagnosis, treatment timing and long-term outcomes across a child's development remain unanswered, and whatever is discovered in the new building won't stay there.

"Anything that we develop in those spaces can be extended beyond the Shriners Children’s system into pediatric healthcare nationally and internationally," she said.

A New Orleans native who spends her downtime hiking, Dr. Cernich isn't chasing one signature discovery or advancement to define her tenure, she said.

“What excites me personally is the impact we can have. It's not one condition. It's not one type of science. We're going to build a team that will look at the Shriners Children’s mission and ask every day, ‘How can we use what we know to make a kid better?’ And that's what I really hope to build.”