Member Spotlight: Carlos Oliveira

Carlos R. Oliveira, MD, PhD, is Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Section of Infectious Diseases and Global Health at Yale School of Medicine. He also holds appointments at Yale School of Public Health as Associate Professor of Biostatistics and of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science. He earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and his PhD in Investigative Medicine from the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Oliveira completed his residency at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas and his fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital. He is board certified in both Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Clinical Informatics.

As a clinician, Dr. Oliveira leads Yale’s clinical programs in Congenital Infectious Diseases, Pediatric COVID-19, and Pediatric HIV/AIDS. He co-chaired the PIDS COVID-19 Therapies Taskforce. He currently serves on the IDSA panel that develops recommendations for the treatment and management of COVID-19 and on the Executive Committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Section on Epidemiology, Public Health & Evidence. Dr. Oliveira is an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (JPIDS).

His research focuses on applied vaccinology and early-life infections and has been continuously funded by the NIH for over a decade. He has received multiple research awards, including the 2025 Hall Award for Clinically Innovative Research Paper, which recognizes a junior or mid-career investigator whose first- or senior-author publication reflects Dr. Caroline B. Hall’s innovative approach to clinical research.

Why pediatric ID? I did not enter residency knowing that pediatric infectious diseases would be my specialty. For me, the path to pediatric infectious diseases started with one patient during residency. I was working in clinic when a young child suddenly collapsed in the waiting room. What had seemed like a routine day changed in an instant. We would later learn that the child’s death was attributed to influenza myocarditis, a rare but devastating complication of a vaccine-preventable infection.

That experience has never left me. It was heartbreaking, but it was also clarifying. It showed me how quickly an infection can change the course of a child’s life and a family’s future. That moment also drew me deeply into the field of vaccinology, and from there, pediatric infectious diseases became the natural home for the questions I cared most about. 

Where have you taken your ID focus? RSV has become a major focus for my team. I am currently leading a study that is investigating innate and adaptive immune responses during early RSV infection and evaluating the acute and longer-term impact of new prevention strategies, like maternal vaccines and monoclonal antibodies.

Congenital CMV is another area where I have been spending a lot of time, especially now that Connecticut has passed a universal newborn screening mandate. As more infants are diagnosed, we are working through the practical questions that follow, like who should be treated, what needs to be monitored, and how we can best support affected infants and families.

What is a recent development in pediatric ID that you are working on? A major theme in my work is understanding how vaccines perform in real-world settings. One example is our HPV vaccine effectiveness study, where we found a gap between prelicensure vaccine efficacy and observed real-world effectiveness. Our findings suggest that delayed vaccine initiation may explain much of that gap, which highlights the importance of timely HPV vaccination.

We also published a study evaluating nirsevimab, a long-acting monoclonal antibody used to prevent RSV in infants. That work is timely because the RSV prevention landscape is changing quickly, with maternal vaccination, nirsevimab, and now clesrovimab all shaping how we think about infant protection. We found that it was highly effective in real-world practice, and the study was among the first to examine how protection holds up over time.

We also have a study currently in press evaluating Connecticut’s hearing-targeted congenital CMV screening mandate. We analyzed more than 200,000 births and found that hearing-targeted screening increased congenital CMV diagnosis rates four-fold. However, many cases were likely still left unidentified, a gap that universal screening may help address.

What do you enjoy most about being a PIDS member? What keeps you renewing your membership? What I enjoy most about PIDS is that it keeps me connected to the people that first drew me into the field. It is a small enough field that the society feels personal, but broad enough that I am always learning from colleagues working in other areas. I keep renewing because PIDS helps me stay grounded in the field. It gives me a way to follow the work of colleagues I respect, find collaborators, and stay connected to the larger pediatric ID community beyond my own institution. Access to JPIDS is also a nice perk.