Mark L. Batshaw, M.D., is currently the "Fight for Children" Chair of Academic Medicine and Chief Academic Officer at the Children's National Medical Center (CNMC) in Washington, D.C., and serves as Professor and Chairman of Pediatrics and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D.C. Dr. Batshaw is also Director of the Children's Research Institute at CNMC. Dr. Batshaw is a board-certified neurodevelopmental pediatrician who has treated children with developmental disabilities for more than 25 years. Before moving to Washington in 1998, he was Physician-in-Chief of Children's Seashore House, the child development and rehabilitation institute of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and held the W.T. Grant Chair in Child Development at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Dr. Batshaw is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. Following pediatric residency in his native Canada at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, he completed a fellowship in developmental pediatrics at the Kennedy Institute (now called the Kennedy Krieger Institute) and The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore.
He remained a professor at Johns Hopkins for 13 years and won the prestigious Alexander Schaffer teaching award while there. A Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Scholar and recipient of major grants from the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Batshaw is director of the NIH-funded Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Center at CNMC and continues to pursue his research on innovative treatments for inborn errors of metabolism, including gene therapy. Dr. Batshaw has published more than 130 articles, chapters, and reviews on his research interests and on the medical aspects of the care of children with disabilities. Dr. Batshaw was the founding editor in chief (1995 - 2001) of the journal
Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews. He is also the editor of
When Your Child Has a Disability: The Complete Sourcebook of Daily and Medical Care, Revised Edition (Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 2001), and
Handbook of Developmental Disabilities (co-edited with Kurtz, Dowrick, & Levy; Aspen Publishers, 1996). Dr. Batshaw is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and is a member of the American Pediatric Society, the Society for Inherited Metabolic Disorders, the Society for Pediatric Research, and the Society for Developmental Pediatrics. Dr. Batshaw's investment in the well-being of children was first sparked by his parents, both of whom were social workers; his father was involved in modernizing the juvenile justice system in Quebec. Dr. Batshaw's wife, Karen, is a social worker in the field of international adoptions. His children also continue this legacy of making a difference: His daughter, Elissa, is a special education teacher and co-authored the chapter on special education in this edition of Children with Disabilities; his son Michael is a social worker; and his younger son, Drew, has overcome the challenges of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder to graduate from Vassar College and enter business school.
