Member Spotlight: Jennifer Schuster

Jennifer Schuster, MD, MSCI, is Professor of Pediatrics at Children’s Mercy Kansas City (CMKC) and University of Missouri Kansas City. She graduated from the Medical College of Georgia and completed her pediatric residency at Children’s Memorial Hospital/ Northwestern (now Lurie Children’s). Her pediatric infectious diseases fellowship and Master of Science in Clinical Investigation were both completed at Vanderbilt University.

Dr. Schuster is a newly elected member of the Board of Directors and was the PIDS liaison to the ACIP maternal/pediatric RSV workgroup. Previously, she served on the Clinical Affairs Committee, Fellowship Awards Committee, and Training Programs Committee. She was also the JPIDS-Ralph D. Feigin Apprentice, later serving as a Journal Associate Editor, and remains a member of the editorial board.

Why pediatric ID? When I was younger, I wanted to be a detective. I loved logic puzzles, riddles, games, and mystery novels. When I went to college, I took a microbiology class, loved it, and I decided to go to medical school. At Medical College of Georgia, I was able to round with some amazing infectious diseases physicians.

Those pediatric ID doctors were going out into rural areas to take care of children with HIV. These were children who otherwise had no available care or resources. That experience was when I knew I wanted to do pediatric infectious diseases. I went into residency knowing exactly what I wanted, and my mentors at Northwestern further solidified it.

Where have you taken your ID focus? When I was in fellowship at Vanderbilt, I was lucky to have great mentors who are PIDS members and who were doing both bench and clinical research. From them, I gained exposure to respiratory virus research. When I became an attending in Kansas City, I knew that was the area I wanted to focus my research career. Like most ID doctors, everything changed during the pandemic. For me, that meant pivoting to research to study respiratory viruses outside of a hospital and in school settings.

Most children never go to the hospital, but they do go to school. We know very little about respiratory virus circulation and transmission in school settings. Since the pandemic, schools have been my focus because that’s where kids are.

What is a recent development in pediatric ID that you are working on? One of the things that I’m proudest of is our team at Children’s Mercy. We have set up a respiratory viral surveillance program in the second largest school district in Missouri. We perform respiratory virus surveillance in students and staffs in schools, and we have been able to establish rates of different respiratory viral infections in kids going to school.

Setting up a surveillance system outside of a hospital takes a lot of effort and buy-in. We needed really good partners in the school district who would accept this idea: the superintendent, teachers, students, parents. So, our ability to do research in such a setting is really a gift.

What do you enjoy most about being a PIDS member? What keeps you renewing your membership? I love pediatric ID clinicians and scientists. I have gotten to meet incredible people through my association with PIDS. The peds ID world is small enough where PIDS can connect us together through all of the different resources.

PIDS has amazing resources for everyone to use. I was previously our fellowship director here at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. Being able to introduce our fellows into the world of PIDS and help them start to develop their academic interests, network, and grow through the resources PIDS makes available is awesome.

My interest in being on the board was in being part of this incredible group. When I attended my first board meeting at IDWeek I was impressed by all that is going on behind the scenes to advocate both for children, peds ID professionals, and our field. I am really excited to be part of this group.