Dr. Jocelyn R. Grunwell, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Critical Care Medicine at Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Dr. Grunwell completed her undergraduate studies in chemistry at Harvard University. She then attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley where she received a PhD in Bio-organic Chemistry. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship in biochemistry at the University of California San Francisco, where she was a Damon Runyon post-doctoral fellow, she attended the Stanford University School of Medicine. She completed her Pediatrics Residency at Emory University in 2012. Dr. Grunwell served the Assistant Program Director (Chief Resident) for the Emory Pediatrics Residency program from 2012 - 2013. She completed her subspecialty fellowship training in pediatric critical care medicine at Emory in 2017 where she was a T32 post-doctoral fellow. From 2018 - 2020, Dr. Grunwell was an Atlanta Pediatric K12 Scholar. In 2020, Dr. Grunwell was awarded Junior Faculty Researcher of the Year. She is currently a NHLBI K23 awardee. Dr. Grunwell completed the postgraduate coursework for the Master of Science in Clinical and Translational Research (MSCR) degree at Emory in 2022.

Dr. Grunwell’s research focuses on the airway immune response in children who are at risk for developing and who are diagnosed with acute respiratory distress syndrome. She has a research program in immunophenotyping and determining patient-reported outcomes following life-threatening asthma exacerbations. She collaborates with engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology to develop a lung-on-a-chip model and data scientists and machine learning experts at Emory/Georgia Tech to discover transcriptomic and metabolomic signatures of pediatric acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In addition to her translational research, she participates in the Pediatric Acute Lung Injury and Sepsis Investigators (PALISI) network and collaborates on multi-center observational and clinical trials to improve the care of critically ill children with ARDS (LEOPARDS), influenza (PICFLU2), sepsis (PROMPT-BOLUS), and multiple organ dysfunction (PARADIGM, TROPICS). She is a member of the SCCM Discover Research Network and the Pediatric Acute Lung Injury Consensus Conference (PALICC-2) guideline committee.

In 2022, Dr. Grunwell became the Research Director for the Division of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.

Research interests

• Understanding heterogeneity of complex critical illness syndromes with subphenotyping and endotyping strategies
• Using machine learning to develop clinical prediction models and clinical decision support
• Developing preclinical models that represent pediatric acute respiratory distress syndrome to identify underlying mechanisms, heterogeneity, and test interventions targeted at causal biological pathways