Leslie Pineda, MD

Dr. Leslie Pineda is a board-certified neonatologist whose current research focus is on improving neurological outcomes in the neonatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) population. She joined AdventHealth for Children in 2016 and has been an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at UCF College of Medicine since 2017. Dr. Pineda received her MD from Dartmouth Medical School. She did both her residency and fellowship at Duke, where she was very involved in research and quality improvement projects which resulted in first-author publications and national presentations. Her work addressed the neonatal gastrointestinal microbiome and necrotizing enterocolitis and the benefits of palliative care consults and educational gaps on palliative care in residency training. Concurrent with her neonatology fellowship at Duke, she earned a master’s degree in Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she received training in research, epidemiology, leadership, management, and policy. At Duke, she was a certified examiner involved in identifying and enrolling infants in hypothermia trials and cord blood trials. Dr. Pineda has been actively involved in identifying and enrolling infants in multicenter clinical trials for adjunctive therapies to hypothermia for HIE. She has taken the lead to change AdventHealth for Children’s current practice to initiate enteral feedings during hypothermia for HIE.