Center for Addiction Medicine

Sara Bates, MD

Founding Director of the Infant Brain Center at MGH for Children, Instructor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School

Dr. Bates graduated from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and completed her pediatric residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. After completing the Harvard Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Program in 2012, she joined the MGH Division of Newborn Medicine and Neonatology.

Dr. Bates’s studies focus on neonatal environmental, genetic, and metabolic influences on normal and pathological brain development. She and her team are applying advanced neuroimaging acquisition and analysis methodologies to improve our understanding of infant brain structure and function in a broad range of clinical contexts. Dr. Bates has served as the site PI on neonatal interventional clinical trials and has lectured both locally and regionally on the topics of neuroimaging, fetal drug exposures, management of perinatal brain insults, and emerging cell-based therapies.

Her current work is focused on detecting brain insults resulting from Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy as well as exploring brain development in infants with in-utero drug exposures. Her K12 project focused on infants born to mothers with Opiate Use Disorders and the potential value of early neuroimaging biomarkers for improving treatment and outcome in opioid-exposed neonates.