Background
Dr. Elizabeth Tucker is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is a clinician scientist with a deep interest in neurocritical care, global health and infectious diseases. She joined the Johns Hopkins PICU faculty as an Instructor in July of 2015. As an attending physician, her clinical time is spent caring for critically ill children in the pediatric intensive care unit, with particular expertise as a pediatric neurocritical intensive care. Together with other members of the PICU team, she works to stabilize the patients and improve their outlook. She enjoys getting to know the families and values the opportunity to guide them through the course of their child’s illness and recovery.
Her clinical experience caring for children with neurological injury led her to the lab where she is passionate about conducting basic science and translational research to investigate how to improve her patient’s outcomes after brain injury. Dr. Tucker’s research focuses on tuberculous meningitis, the most severe form of extrapulmonary TB which disproportionately affects young children. The long-term goal of her research is to understand the pathogenesis of brain injury during tuberculous meningitis in children and design antimicrobial and adjunctive therapy as well as therapeutic monitoring to improve treatment and prognosis of children with devastating infections. In pursuit of this goal, she developed the first pediatric rabbit model of tuberculous meningitis during her pediatric critical care medicine fellowship to understand how the infection affects the developing brain and to investigate how to optimize meningitis treatment. Dr. Tucker’s research benefits from a strong network of mentors and collaborators in neuroscience, pediatric infectious disease, nuclear medicine, pharmacology and nanomedicine.
When she is not at work, Dr. Tucker enjoys running, hiking, sailing, and traveling to other countries.
Dr. Tucker received her undergraduate degree at Duke University in 2004 and attended medical school at Wake Forest University from 2005 to 2009. She completed her residency in pediatrics from 2009 to 2012 and her fellowship in pediatric critical care from 2012 to 2015, both at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.