Advances in Care

On this episode of Advances in Care, host Erin Welsh revisits the story behind the GUARDIAN study, which screens thousands of newborn babies against rare disease by sequencing their genes, and looking for more conditions than any of the current standard screening panels. She hears from Dr. Jordan Orange on why genetic testing is a promising way of not only catching treatable rare diseases in infants but also expanding health equity...

On this episode of Advances in Care, Erin Welsh speaks with Dr. Lawrence Lustig, otolaryngologist-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia. Dr. Lustig has spent decades working to advance various interventions to treat genetic deafness and after years of research, his team was the first to show that gene therapies could be effective at reversing hearing loss in mouse models.

Dr. Lustig focused his initial study on otoferlin, a...

On this episode of Advances in Care, Erin Welsh is joined by Dr. Barbara Ma, a medical oncologist at NewYork-Presbyterian who leads Cellular Therapy for Solid Tumors at Weill-Cornell Medicine. Dr. Ma and her team are at the forefront of advancing cell-based treatments which include tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy—or TIL—a groundbreaking cell therapy for metastatic melanoma that received FDA approval in 2024. Their...

On this episode of Advances in Care, Erin Welsh is joined by Dr. Leonardo Lopez, a psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian and vice chair for inpatient services in the Department of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Lopez and his team are at the forefront of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and have built one of the largest programs of its kind in the country dedicated to treating severe psychiatric illness through this revolu...

On this episode of Advances in Care, Dr. Steven Lobritto, pediatric medical director for liver transplant at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia, joins host Erin Welsh to tell the story of a high-risk pediatric liver transplant that he and his team performed to save the life of a two month old baby, after the center where the baby was originally treated deemed her inoperable. 

Dr. Lobritto describes how NewYork-Presbyterian and ...

On this episode of Advances in Care, Erin Welsh is joined by Dr. Howard Fine, a neuro-oncologist at NewYork-Presbyterian and director of the Brain Tumor Center at Weill Cornell Medicine, to explore his pioneering research on glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive form of brain cancer.

Glioblastoma has long resisted meaningful therapeutic progress. When Dr. Fine began working in this field, the median survival after d...

Erin Welsh is joined by Dr. Jennifer Haythe, director of the Adult Pulmonary Hypertension Center and Cardio-Obstetrics programs at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia, to discuss the prevalence of high-risk pregnancies due to heart disease and the multi-disciplinary efforts required for optimal patient care. 

Many women in the US are having children at a later age than in the past, and with that comes an increased occurrence of ...

On this episode of Advances in Care, Erin Welsh and Dr. Jeffrey Greenfield, pediatric neurosurgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian and director of the Chiari CARE program at Weill Cornell Medicine, discuss a rare condition called Chiari malformation. 

Typically diagnosed by MRI, Chiari malformation is classified when part of the cerebellum descends into the upper spinal canal. Though some of the most severe types of Chiari malformatio...

Erin Welsh is joined by Dr. Jeffrey Port, a thoracic surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine, and a leader in thoracic surgical oncology, to discuss advances in minimally invasive robotic surgery and the unique collaborative care model that his program employs to operate on complex chest tumors.

When Dr. Port first started his career, the surgical techniques used to operate on lung cancer patients were akin to op...

On this episode of Advances in Care, host Erin Welsh is joined by Dr. Mirella Mourad, maternal-fetal medicine specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian and co-director of the Preterm Birth Prevention Center at Columbia, to explore a groundbreaking new technology aimed at improving the diagnosis and treatment of preterm birth.

Preterm birth impacts approximately 1 in 10 pregnancies in the United States, making it a leading cause of neonata...

On this episode of Advances in Care, Erin Welsh is joined by Dr. Cara Agerstrand, director of the Medical ECMO Program at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia, and Dr. Matthew Baldwin, critical care specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian and research lead of Columbia’s Baldwin Lab which focuses on the study of critical illness survivorship. 

Thousands of people suffer from cardiopulmonary conditions such as cardiac arrest and s...

On this episode of Advances in Care, host Erin Welsh is joined by Dr. Scott Tagawa, medical oncologist at NewYork-Presbyterian and director of the Genitourinary Oncology Program at Weill Cornell Medicine, to talk about the latest developments in prostate cancer care. 

On this episode of Advances in Care, host Erin Welsh is joined by Dr. Scott Tagawa, medical oncologist at NewYork-Presbyterian and director of the Genitourinary ...

On this episode of Advances in Care, host Erin Welsh sits down with Dr. Thomas Bottiglieri, chief of the primary care sports medicine division at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia, to discuss the evolving landscape of concussion care– from prevalence to emerging diagnostic breakthroughs. 

With over 2 million estimated concussions occurring annually in the United States, and many of them affecting young athletes, Dr. Bott...

On the final episode of 2025, host Erin Welsh is joined by Courtney Allison, host of NewYork-Presbyterian’s health and wellness podcast, Health Matters, to recap the year’s highlights from their dozens of conversations with clinicians, researchers, and health care specialists from Columbia & Weill Cornell Medicine. They highlight key takeaways, revisit groundbreaking treatments that were pioneered across the institu...

For any patient diagnosed with depression for the first time, the recommended course of treatment is the same: a medication like a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), an evidence based psychotherapy, or both. But there is a large group of people for whom these treatments simply won't work. That’s where Dr. Conor Liston and his team focus. In this episode from the Advances in Care archives, Dr. Liston speaks with fo...

In this episode from the Advances in Care archives, Dr. Pierre Elias sits down with Catherine Price to talk about how utilizing technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning can help diagnose patients even before symptoms develop, and support doctors by freeing them up to focus on providing personalized care to their patients. They discuss navigating bias in both artificial intelligence and clinical care, and how n...

With perspectives spanning hepatobiliary, gynecologic, and cardiac surgeries, NewYork-Presbyterian’s Dr. Jason Hawksworth (Columbia), Dr. Tamatha Fenster (Weill Cornell Medicine), and Dr. Arnar Geirsson (Columbia) describe how they each came to incorporate robotics into their practices. One of the biggest takeaways: robotic surgeries allow for more accuracy in minimally-invasive approaches; so patients experience shorter hosp...

Catherine Price and Dr. Emile Bacha, Chief of the Division of Cardiac, Thoracic, and Vascular Surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia discuss the history of heart surgery, ventricular assist devices, and a new frontier in cardiac surgery: The Total Artificial Heart. Dr. Bacha tells the groundbreaking story of successfully fitting a pediatric patient with a Total Artificial Heart. He explains the nuances of the procedure, and how a...

Dr. Chris Ahmad knows firsthand how devastating an untimely injury can be for a young athlete. In this episode from the Advances in Care archives, Dr. Ahmad discusses how his own college soccer injury led him to fall in love with orthopedics. He tells the history of the infamous baseball injury that resulted in the invention of Tommy John surgery, and shares how he learned to perform the corrective procedure from the man who design...