Caring for infants from their first breath, locally, statewide and globally

Dr. Scott Guthrie, a Lipscomb alumnus and Fulbright Scholar, works to improve newborns’ health in his backyard and across the globe.

Janel Shoun-Smith | 615-966-7078 | 08/13/2023

Dr. Scott Guthrie (BA ’95) always knew he liked children and science, so going into pediatric medicine made sense.

While his undergraduate degree at Lipscomb got him the credentials he needed to move on to medical school at East Tennessee State University, it also sparked a passion in him for global health mission work.

Today the Huntsville, Alabama-native is a specialist in neonatology, professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and the chair of the pediatric department at Ayers Children’s Medical Center at Jackson-Madison County General Hospital where he primarily works. 

He also works, however, to benefit newborns around the globe through international mission work, international research, and as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar Specialist who has worked with the government of Azerbaijan to improve their neonatal mortality rates.

As the attending neonatologist, Guthrie cares for newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of the Jackson, Tennessee, hospital. He also works with families before the birth of a baby expected to have health problems.

In fact, while working on his post-graduate training at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, he was tapped to help establish the Jackson NICU, which is an affiliate of Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

As part of the establishment of the Jackson NICU, providers made it a clinical research site that has been conducting National Institutes of Health- and industry-funded research since 2009, said Guthrie.
Guthrie’s research avenues have involved developing aerosolized, or breathable, versions of medications to treat respiratory distress syndrome in newborn infants in the NICU as well as a way to administer probiotics in infants to prevent a serious  inflammation of the preterm infant’s intestine.

One of his projects, carried out with the Tennessee Initiative for Perinatal Quality Care, a state organization that works to improve care for mothers and families and involving more than 61,600 babies over the course of a year, was recently accepted to be published in Pediatrics, he said.

But beyond the city or statewide level, Guthrie also works to spread better ways to care for babies using available resources to countries across the globe with educational efforts focused in the Middle East and Africa.

“I have always been involved in global health in one way or another and Lipscomb was my first introduction to this,” said Guthrie. He enjoys finding creative solutions to the challenges of health care in low-resource environments and training local health care providers to more effectively save lives.

Recently, he began working with the Institute for Child Healthcare Africa in Tanzania where he helps lead what has become the largest neonatal medicine conference on the African continent. He has additionally served as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar Specialist, and has traveled to Azerbaijan at the request of their government to teach neonatology and implement projects that helped improve the country’s neonatal mortality rate.

In 2022, Guthrie traveled to India to prepare doctors in five hospitals for a clinical trial of a new technique to treat respiratory distress syndrome in premature infants. Lipscomb Ward Fellow Kaylee Wu (BS ’23), now at Wake Forest Medical School, was selected to serve as a clinical research assistant and joined him on the trip to train providers on how to perform the technique and explain its proven effectiveness.

Wu helped prepare physicians on how to perform the new technique and explained its data and proven effectiveness. Later Wu analyzed videos of the doctors performing the procedure to assess the patients’ pain level.

Guthrie also mentored Wu as she prepared a presentation on the work done in India at the 2023 Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) Meeting, attended by more than  8,000 pediatricians from around the world, in Washington D.C., a very unusual opportunity for an undergraduate, he said.

“It’s fun to be able to influence the next generation and to help see them obtain the skills and tools needed to succeed,” said Guthrie,

“It was a lot of fun to help Kaylee through the research process and to get her to the point where she can present at an international meeting like PAS,” said Guthrie. “That’s part of what I like about mentoring. To get students excited about a career in medicine, and to maybe give them an idea they may not have thought about before. I don’t think global health was on Kaylee’s radar, but now she is enrolled in Wake’s Global Health Certificate Program while she is working on her MD.”

“It is satisfying to see someone grow, develop, mature and expand their horizons,” he said.

Guthrie said he also draws from his time at Lipscomb when working one-on-one with families at a difficult time in their lives. His study at Lipscomb, especially in bioethics within the philosophy program, has helped him to be able to sit down with a family and process the unexpected outcomes and help them make decisions in a compassionate way, he said.

“Because I may have to deal with the death of a newborn, one of the most tragic times in someone’s  life, the opportunity for spiritual discussions frequently arises. Being able to address the entire family and not to be afraid to talk about faith is very valuable,” said Guthrie.

“I’ve been asked to pray with families. I’ve been asked to baptize a child. Those things are central to people’s faith and it’s important to be able to walk with them through those periods and feel confident doing that,” he said. “Lipscomb prepared me to be able to do that and do that well.”