The Department of Anesthesiology is pleased to announce that Dr. Arvind Palanisamy, MD, FRCA, won the best paper award for his abstract, ‘Effect of uterine hypercontractility on the placenta and the fetal brain’, at the recently concluded annual meeting of the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology (SOAP) in Miami, FL. In a pregnant rat model, Dr. Palanisamy was able to demonstrate that transient events during labor and delivery, such as uterine hypercontractility and fetal distress, can have lasting consequences for the developing brain. Using novel imaging and molecular biology tools, Dr. Palanisamy’s overarching interest is to understand the effect of an adverse perinatal environment on the trajectory of early brain development and behavior, and how such an environment acts in concert with underlying genetic vulnerability to generate atypical neurodevelopmental phenotypes. He was previously awarded a Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research (FAER) Mentored Research Training Grant for studying the effect of maternal anesthesia on the developing brain. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Palanisamy on this accomplishment.