Peter Mourani, MD

Dr. Peter M. Mourani is a physician-scientist, healthcare leader, and Chief of the Division of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, where he holds the Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professorship in Pediatric Research and serves as Associate Chair for Research in the Department of Pediatrics. He is board certified in both Pediatric Critical Care and Pulmonary Medicine. A practicing pediatric intensivist for nearly three decades, Dr. Mourani is committed to advancing a learning health system in which scientific discovery, clinical care, and continuous improvement are closely integrated to improve outcomes for critically ill children. He is an NIH-funded investigator with national leadership roles in the NICHD Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network (CPCCRN) and is an active member of the Pediatric Acute Lung Injury and Sepsis Investigators (PALISI) Network. His research focuses on improving the diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes of children with critical illness, including the development of novel precision diagnostic approaches for severe respiratory infections. Before joining Michigan Medicine in 2025, Dr. Mourani served as President and Chief Research Officer of Arkansas Children’s Research Institute, where he helped expand extramural research funding, faculty recruitment, and research infrastructure, and previously served as Medical Director of the Children’s Hospital Colorado Research Institute, where he led substantial growth in clinical research operations and trial support. Throughout his career, he has also been deeply committed to mentorship, guiding students, trainees, and junior faculty toward independent research careers and academic leadership. At Michigan, Dr. Mourani brings together clinical expertise, scientific investigation, mentorship, and institutional leadership to strengthen pediatric research and translate discovery into better care for children and families.

Dr. Mourani’s research focuses on understanding why children experience markedly different outcomes after severe respiratory illness and using that knowledge to develop more precise approaches to diagnosis, risk prediction, prevention, and treatment. His work spans acute and chronic pediatric lung disease, including viral lower respiratory tract infections, pediatric acute respiratory distress syndrome, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, and pulmonary hypertension. A major emphasis of his research is identifying biological, clinical, environmental, and microbial factors that distinguish resilience from vulnerability following early-life respiratory illness. He leads the NHLBI-funded SPIN VINYL consortium, which integrates longitudinal clinical phenotyping, pulmonary function testing, imaging, environmental exposure assessment, and advanced molecular analyses to define respiratory disease trajectories in young children. He also leads a NIAID-funded multi-center project employing metagenomic next-generation sequencing approaches that combine pathogen detection with host immune responses to improve the diagnosis of severe lower respiratory tract infections in critically ill children. His collaborative research also includes the study of premature infants at risk for bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) and pulmonary hypertension (PH), two serious and interrelated complications of premature birth. His research has helped define the epidemiologic relationship between BPD and pulmonary hypertension and evaluate the use of echocardiography to identify pulmonary hypertension in vulnerable infants. His team has also developed predictive models for BPD, pulmonary hypertension, and long-term outcomes that have contributed to clinical approaches and care guidelines for this high-risk population. Across these areas, his goal is to translate mechanistic and clinical discoveries into tools that enable earlier identification of high-risk patients and more individualized care.