Moving Evidence to Action: Dr. Chris Rees Works to Improve the Lives of Children at Home and Abroad

Date: June 02, 2026

At Children’s and around the world, Dr. Chris Rees is helping shape the future of pediatric clinical care through childhood mortality prevention research, international partnerships, and physician education.

When asked what led him to pursue a career in medicine, Chris Rees, MD, MPH, doesn’t pause to consider his answer—it comes quickly. He was a teen on a family trip to El Salvador at a time when there were stories on the news that made him realize that not everyone had the same access to healthcare as his family.

“It opened my eyes to the reality that people have very different lived experiences based on where they were born,” he said. “I wanted to do something to help alleviate the kind of suffering I saw there.”

The desire to alleviate the kind of suffering he witnessed led him to study medicine and public health in a joint degree program at the University of Utah. He then chose to complete his pediatrics residency and chief residency at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine because they offered a program where residents could provide clinical care to patients in Africa for a year as part of their training.

It was there, as one of only eight pediatricians in the southeastern African country of Malawi, that he committed to making research part of his career as well. “I saw about one in 10 pediatric patients dying during their hospitalization there.” he said. “It’s hard to wrap your mind around but seeing that kind of devastation to families deeply impacted me.”

As time went on, he also saw the impact of the clinical care he could provide—truly saving lives every day largely through initial resuscitation and stabilization—but he knew his time there was limited. “From the day I was wheels down in Malawi, I would be wheels up 365 days later,” he said. “I wanted to find a way to make a lasting impact beyond the time I could be there.”

Research, he realized, could create that lasting impact. “I noticed that there were gaps in clinical care and evidence to support best practices—and that sometimes we didn’t even know what the child had due to diagnostic limitations in the clinical setting,” he said. “Knowledge generation and dissemination is so important to provide high quality clinical care.

“I knew I could do something by learning what had happened in the past and applying it to what’s happening now and what would happen even after I left Malawi, and in other similar settings,” he continued. “Additionally, I witnessed how low-resource solutions can inform clinical care in all settings, even in the highest resourced children’s hospitals in the U.S.”

It was in Malawi that Dr. Rees’s passion for pediatric emergency medicine was born. “Over half of inpatient deaths among young children in sub-Saharan Africa occur in the first 24 hours of hospital admission, which speaks to the need for improvements in initial resuscitation and stabilization to reduce overwhelmingly high rates of childhood mortality in this region,” he said.

He realized that what he had learned in pediatric emergency departments in the U.S. informed the clinical care he provided in Malawi—and vice versa. “In settings where resources are constrained, it is crucial to provide risk-differentiated care, meaning it’s key to identify which child is at risk of deterioration and dedicate additional resources to that child,” he said. “In pediatric emergency departments in the U.S., we practice evidence-based risk differentiated clinical care all the time—be it at the time of triage, or at the time of making decisions about hospitalization or discharge home.”

After completing residency, Dr. Rees went on to complete his fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine and global health at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School before joining Children’s and Emory. As a fellow, he further honed his clinical, procedural and research skills, and collaborative efforts with organizations including UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Now, Dr. Rees is an extramurally funded clinician scientist who is highly committed to advancing approaches to prevent childhood mortality in resource-limited settings and to providing the highest quality clinical care to kids closer to home here in Georgia. He is a physician in the Emergency Department at Children’s, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine with the Emory School of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics, Director of the Global Health Office of Pediatrics at Emory and Children’s, and a Pediatric Research Scientist with the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) Program Office where he directs research efforts related to quality of clinical care across nine sites in sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Finding a North Star

As an emergency medicine physician and global health researcher, Dr. Rees treats and studies a variety of health conditions, but the common thread in all of his work is that he seeks to reduce suffering and prevent child mortality.

“The true north is that my work revolves around childhood mortality prevention,” he said.

In addition to providing care at Children’s, Dr. Rees works with a variety of global health organizations, including CHAMPS, the WHO, and academic partners in Peru to try to solve health problems that impact children.

With CHAMPS, Dr. Rees works with large teams of clinicians, researchers, Ministries of Health, and public health professionals across nine sites in sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to identify and understand what happened when a child under five has died. “For families who want to know what happened to their child, we collect every piece of data we could have ever thought of in terms of clinical data, the family’s story about what was going on before the child died, and we use novel and extensive postmortem testing to determine causes of death,” he said. “Then, importantly, all of this is used by public health authorities to inform interventions to prevent childhood deaths in the future, whether that be focusing on new vaccine development or health systems reform.”

Dr. Rees has collaborated with the WHO to create guidelines related to the clinical care for young children who come to the hospital with pneumonia, which is the leading infectious cause of death for children under five worldwide. “In my opinion, there is no way to have a larger and more impactful influence on the clinical care of children around the world than providing evidence that helps shape WHO guidelines that are used widely across the globe,” he said. “It’s the honor of my career to be able to play a role in that process.”

Along with colleagues in Kenya, Dr. Rees is working to develop tools and biomarkers that clinicians can use to identify which children are at the highest risk for mortality upon admission to the hospital and in the vulnerable time after a patient is released from the hospital.

“Even here, I see a lot of children who check the boxes for the warning signs that I have learned about in my research globally,” he said. “The work on mortality prevention I did in Africa impacts the work I do here at the bedside in the U.S. by helping us predict the worsening of symptoms and identify which patients will need a higher level of care. It has also led to my involvement in multi-center research in the U.S. that led to the development of risk assessment tools that we use for children with pneumonia.”

Educating the Next Generation

Another project Dr. Rees is working on gives him the chance to do something else he is passionate about—train the next generation of pediatric physicians and scientists who share his commitment to caring for children around the world.

Through his work as Director of the Global Health Office of Pediatrics at Emory and Children’s (GHOPE), Dr. Rees and his team are conducting policy-shifting research on reducing anemia among children in Peru, a country where about 40% of kids have anemia. This research has led to a more nuanced approach in Peru to diagnosing and treating anemia at the national level, moving past the assumption that all children have iron-deficiency anemia. In addition to conducting research, Children’s and Emory are completing bilateral exchanges for trainees to and from Peru, meaning that residents from the U.S. go to Peru to learn, while medical students from Peru come to Children’s as observers.

“The students who come here from Peru are blown away by the collaborative nature of how we care for patients at Children’s,” said Dr. Rees. “It has been so eye-opening for them to see simple things like how many people are on rounds, with everyone’s voices being important and respected. It is a huge value add for their education and helps them recognize that all voices matter and improve the clinical care we provide for children.”

Having the opportunity to lead projects like these is part of what led him to Children’s and Emory. “The wonderful environment for teaching and research, and the world class clinical care brought me to Children’s and Emory,” he said. “In addition to caring for patients and doing research, I have the opportunity to mentor medical students, graduate students, and junior faculty.”

GHOPE is unique for many reasons, one of them being that it provides a first-of-its-kind pathway for Children’s and Emory pediatrics residents committed to careers in global child health. It serves as an administrative home to Emory and Children’s faculty and trainees who are passionate about global health, supporting trainees’ research and evaluation efforts. “GHOPE supports partnership development with collaborators across the globe, including Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Peru, South Africa, Belize, and many more,” Dr. Rees said. “I am immensely grateful to Children’s and Emory and to the donors who support GHOPE’s work.”

Dr. Rees also works with Discovery, a program for where Emory medical students spend 4 – 6 months doing dedicated research, working closely with faculty members. He has paired medical students with colleagues around the world, bringing value to the students and to international colleagues. Pairing mentees across partner sites promotes cross-cultural collaboration and helps spur evidence into action.

“Our students bring the time to think about these problems,” he said. “So often our partners are moving so quickly to care for patients because the need is so great that they don’t have the time to write about what they are seeing and doing, but our students can help support with that aspect. Our students, in turn, learn about global problems and how the solutions in resource-limited settings can inform solutions everywhere. It also helps our students learn the immense value of equitable and ethical research conducted in settings other than their own.”

Working with students is also inspirational to Dr. Rees. “Helping students understand how to do this is about more than science; it is an art,” he said. “I love seeing their excitement and helping them along the way. Working with students reminds me how much I loved this in the beginning.”

Building the Bicycle While We’re Riding It

Dr. Rees is clear about one thing: he loves his work. The collaborative nature of working together in the emergency department, and in partnering with colleagues around the globe to prevent child mortality is invigorating.

When students or colleagues ask him for career advice, he reflects back to the trip to El Salvador that ultimately led him to a career in medicine and research. His suggestion is simple: think about the things that bother you, the problems you find yourself thinking about when they aren’t immediately in front of you and get to work to try to solve them. Sometimes, as with his global health work, that means building the bicycle while we are riding it.

“I can tell you that the ride is very fulfilling and leads to career longevity, challenges to overcome that make you think and grow, and a lot of excitement,” he said. “I truly love my job!”

To date, Dr. Rees has nearly 140 publications, many in high-impact journals. Some of Dr. Rees’ most recent publications include: