Noted pediatric surgeon David Kays, M.D., has joined the Department of Surgery in the new role of medical director of the All Children’s Hospital Johns Hopkins Medicine Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Program. Dr. Kays will also serve as director of the ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) Program and co-director of the Fetal Diagnosis/Treatment Program.

Dr. Kays brings more than two decades of clinical and research leadership in the treatment of congenital diaphragmatic hernia, a life-threatening birth defect, to the Department of Surgery and the Johns Hopkins All Children’s Maternal, Fetal & Neonatal Institute. His research has focused on defining the best treatment strategies for this challenging neonatal diagnosis and contributed to significant advances in surgical repair. Dr. Kays and his team achieved an 88 percent survival rate for surgical repair of congenital diaphragmatic hernia over a 20-year period.

He comes to St. Petersburg after more than 20 years at UF Health and Shands Children’s Hospital, where he was surgeon-in-chief, medical director of the congenital diaphragmatic hernia program and medical director of pediatric respiratory and ventilator support. He also was a professor of surgery and chief of the division of pediatric surgery in the University of Florida College of Medicine, Department of Surgery. He is the author or coauthor of 50 peer-reviewed original science publications and speaks nationally and internationally on congenital diaphragmatic hernia repair.

Dr. Kays has chaired several committees of the American Pediatric Surgical Association and is an editor of Selected Readings in General Surgery, Pediatric Surgery Edition. He is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and the American Academy of Pediatrics and a member of the Children’s Oncology Group.

After graduating from the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, Dr. Kays completed a surgical residency at Strong Memorial Hospital, University of Rochester Medical Center. He joined the UF faculty following a pediatric surgery fellowship at Morgan-Stanley Children’s Hospital of Columbia University, New York. 

For more information, visit Pediatric General Surgery. To make an appointment or to ask questions, please call 727 -767-4170.