Dr. Edward Karotkin
Norfolk, Virginia
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Vote Now! Over the past 20 years, Ed Karotkin, who is chairman of Physicians for Peace (PFP), a neonatologist at the Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters (CHKD), and a professor of Pediatrics at Eastern Virginia Medical School, has been a PFP team leader on missions to Cuba, Israel, Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, Romania and India. On these trips, Karotkin has embodied the PFP train-the-trainer philosophy by presenting vital information on neonatal resuscitation to physicians, nurses and other health care professionals in Latin America and India. This basic education, which in-country medical professionals can share with their peers long after PFP mission volunteers have returned home, makes a lasting, sustainable impact on health care delivery and represents the original vision of Dr. Charles E. Horton, who founded Physicians for Peace in 1989. Karotkin also was the driving force behind the development of PFP's Resource Mothers program, an initiative that minimizes expectant mothers' health risks and decreases infant mortality by ensuring young mothers receive the appropriate prenatal and pediatric care, along with the guidance of older, more experienced women, or resource mothers. Using his experience with Resource Mothers at CHKD, Karotkin helped launch PFP's Madres Tutelares program in the Dominican Republic in November 2005. Since that time, the program has become one of PFP's signature programs. In recent years, Karotkin also has helped PFP develop and broaden its relationships with Indian expatriates in the U.S. and medical professionals in India. Thanks in large part to his efforts, Physicians for Peace has completed multiple missions to India, and in November 2010, Karotkin led a team on a two-week trip to Ahmedabad, Nagpur and Sawangi, India. During that trip, team members presented Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) and Neonatal Resuscitation Program (NRP) training to local medical communities and served as guest lecturers at a conference on life- threatening pediatric diseases, offering their expertise on sepsis, staph infections, labor and delivery techniques and anesthesiology.