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Claudia R. Morris, MD (she/her/hers)

Professor of Pediatrics & Emergency Medicine
Emory University School of Medicine
Emory University School of Medicine
Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Claudia R. Morris MD
Professor of Pediatrics & Emergency Medicine,
Wilbur Fisk Glenn Jr. Distinguished Faculty Chair for Clinical & Translational Research
Research Director, Pediatric Emergency Medicine
Emory University School of Medicine, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Atlanta, GA, USA

Dr. Claudia R. Morris, MD is a Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and holds the Wilbur Fisk Glenn Jr. Distinguished Faculty Chair for Clinical & Translational Research. She is the Director of Research for the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine (PEM) at Emory and is also the Co-Director of the Emory+Children’s Center for Clinical & Translational Research. Clinically she is an attending physician in PEM at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. She received her Bachelor of Science degree from Boston College, her medical degree from Eastern Virginia Medical School, and completed her residency training in Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Oakland (now UCSF-Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland). She went on to do a chief resident year, as well as a fellowship in PEM at Children’s Hospital Oakland, and remained on as faculty until her relocation to Emory in 2012. Dr. Morris has been actively involved in clinical and translational research for over 2 decades. She has a successful track record of extramural funding, clinical trials leadership, high-impact publications and mentorship of fellows, medical students and junior faculty. She was an elected executive committee member of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Section on Integrative Medicine, and has been a champion for integrative approaches to acute pain management. Dr. Morris has mentored over 40 medical students, residents, fellows, post-docs and junior faculty, with over 250 peer review publications, book chapters, review articles and abstracts. She has also been awarded several research mentorship awards, two R01 grants and currently has a NIH/National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health K24 grant that protects her time for mentoring the next generation of physician-scientists with a focus on treatment of arginine-deficiency syndromes. She also provides leadership within the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) as Nodal Co-PI for the SPARC node (San Francisco-Oakland, Atlanta, Providence Research Collaborative). Dr. Morris is a dedicated clinical trialist, best known for her research in sickle cell disease (SCD). She discovered that an arginine deficiency in SCD is the consequence of hemolysis, a process in which red blood cells rupture and release their contents into the blood stream (Morris et al, JAMA 2005). She has demonstrated that low arginine bioavailability is associated with adverse clinical outcomes in SCD including pain, pulmonary hypertension and mortality risk that may be attenuated by arginine replacement therapy. She was awarded an $8.7M grant from the NHLBI in 2020 to lead the definitive phase 3 multi-center trial entitle Sickle Cell Disease Treatment with Arginine Therapy (STArT trial) that is enrolling at 10 PECARN-affiliated sites and exceeding enrollment milestones. She has built a research infrastructure within pediatric emergency medicine over the last decade that insures successful enrollment into research projects with a focus on SCD, integrative pain management and nutritional approaches to disease, in addition to leading studies that target asthma, trauma, seizures, sepsis, COVID-19, HIV, pneumonia and other emergent conditions that cross medical subspecialties. She is also an advocate for precision nutrition that targets distinctive nutritional requirements that arise from acute and chronic diseases.

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