 I met Dr. Charan and she was the first doctor to say to me, I'm going to make sure that you bring your daughter home. She's going to be okay. Throughout Allison's pregnancy, Dr. Charan, director of the Fetal Heart Program, meticulously monitors the baby's congenital heart defect with pioneering imaging techniques. One of the strengths of the Fetal Heart Program at University of Maryland School of Medicine is detecting the congenital heart defects very early on. Dr. Charan is one of the pioneers of first trimester fetal echocardiography. This enables us to see heart defects in a heart as small as that. Early on in the pregnancy, an interdisciplinary team of specialists becomes involved in the care of Allison and her child. I first saw her before she was born when mom was pregnant. She was sent to me to be evaluated for a heart defect and then we're prepared for her birth and for the surgeries that she needed after she was born. To better understand the cause of congenital heart defects, the Fetal Heart Program engages in bi-directional translational research. It's very interesting how translation works because it goes in both directions. Dr. Charan has developed expert techniques with tiny, tiny hearts that we can actually use to image the hearts of mice. For Dr. Yang, mentored and inspired by the research of Dr. E. Albert Reis, the clinic-to-lab collaboration provides more sophisticated mechanisms to study maternal diabetes and its impact on congenital heart disease. He is able to use some of our human techniques and a lot of our human observations to modify his research plans. So this is truly translational research at its best. So we are able to do some translational research using the mouse model and reflecting the condition of human pregnancy. Using the sophisticated imaging developed by Dr. Charan, Dr. Yang was able to replace the more traditional approach of studying histological specimens. And I said, so why don't we try to do this with an imaging like we do in human and apply the same kind of approach and see if this is going to work in animal models. Combined together, we really have a wonderful team in universal melanin in discovering the new mechanism behind maternal diabetes in this congenital heart disease. For students, the research and clinical care at the Fetal Heart Program is inspirational. My interest in OB-GYN first started the first year of medical school when I met Dr. Charan when she was giving a lecture on fetal heart defects. And I fell in love with fetal heart anatomy and she invited me to do research with her, so I've been hooked ever since. I've been very fortunate to be able to work with this young generation and, you know, maybe pass my passion a little bit to them. And for students, researchers and the entire team at the Center for Advanced Fetal Care, the joy is always welcoming back the moms and the babies who were met before birth. It's always exciting to see the kids come back. That's one of the reasons why I do what I do is not only do I get to help families go through these rough and scary kind of surgeries, but I get to see them when they're on the other end and they're growing and happy and normal kids. For grateful moms, participating in research to help the next generation of mothers is a given. I feel very lucky that there is such a dedicated team for this situation that seemed to come out of nowhere and structure it. I'm happy to be part of that changing body of knowledge and for this research to possibly help another mother five, ten years from now.