Elizabeth Alpern is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and the Center for Healthcare Studies of the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She is both a pediatric emergency physician and clinical epidemiologist Her research interests include the use of large databases within research networks to improve the quality of emergent care delivered to children through application of evidence-based work. Dr. Alpern has been a member of the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN), the first federally funded national network for research on emergency medical services for children, since it inception in 2001. In addition to her leadership roles with PECARN, she also was the Principal Investigator on a project funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to develop and leverage the PECARN Registry to establish quality benchmarks for urgent and emergent care. She is also funded by the National Institutes of Health (NICHD) as the Principal Investigator to expand and utilize the PECARN Registry data to study the risk of sepsis in pediatric emergency department patients. Currently Dr. Alpern serves as the standing member on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Study Section on Biomedical Computing and Health Informatics. She has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles and has lectured nationally and internationally.