When a child is living with a serious or life-threatening illness, pediatric palliative care helps families navigate complex decisions, manage symptoms, and find support during some of life’s hardest moments.
At UPMC Children’s, the Pediatric Track of the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship Program prepares physicians to provide this specialized, compassionate care for children and families in Pittsburgh and across the country thanks to philanthropic support from an endowment from The McElhattan Foundation.
A Fellowship with Reach Beyond Pittsburgh
The fellowship program recruits physicians from across the country. Graduates have gone on to care for children in other hospital systems, launch new services, train future clinicians, and expand access in communities where pediatric palliative medicine expertise is limited.
Meet the Fellows
- Kate Ostrander, MD, who completed the fellowship in 2022, established a new pediatric palliative care program within the University of Vermont Health System, where she serves as associate director of the Pediatric Advanced Care Team.
- Colleen Menegaz, MD, a 2023 fellowship graduate, practices pediatric hospice and palliative care at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis. She also serves as an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and trains future pediatric palliative care physicians as palliative medicine fellowship director.
- Taylor Jean Huntington, MD, who completed the fellowship in 2024, practices palliative medicine and critical care at Emory University, where she serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics. She is creating a joint critical care palliative medicine program to expand access in their intensive care unit.
- Aditi Jain Reis, MD, a 2025 fellowship graduate, practices hospital medicine and palliative care at Inova L. J. Murphy Children’s Hospital in Northern Virginia. Her work includes helping the hospital transition its palliative care program from goals-of-care support to more comprehensive services, including symptom management, hospice care, and bereavement support.
- Molly Mack, MD, MS, the current 2025-2026 fellow, is dual trained in pediatric oncology and palliative medicine and holds a master’s degree in medical education. After completing the fellowship, she will remain at UPMC Children’s as an assistant professor of pediatrics, provide oncology and palliative medicine services, and create a pediatric palliative oncology clinic embedded within the oncology clinic.
- Grant Robertson, MD, who will join the fellowship program in July 2026, brings a strong academic foundation and commitment to pediatric palliative care. He developed teaching for ICU residents on delivering serious health news and aims to practice pediatric palliative care while educating others in the field.
Together, these fellows show how specialized training can ripple outward, one physician at a time, one program at a time, and one family at a time.
Building Skills for the Most Meaningful Conversations
Pediatric palliative care is about understanding each child’s needs, honoring each family’s goals, and helping care teams communicate clearly and compassionately.
Fellows train with experienced, empathetic clinicians and an interdisciplinary team that includes physicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, therapists, and other specialists. This team-based model helps fellows learn how to support the whole family while collaborating across specialties and care settings.
The program also emphasizes communication as a clinical skill. Fellows learn how to guide difficult conversations, help families weigh care options, and bring clarity and compassion to moments of uncertainty. For many graduates, that training becomes part of how they teach, mentor, and build programs wherever they go.
Thanks to philanthropic support from the McElhattan Foundation, more fellows will complete the program and carry this expertise into communities across the country. “It has been important to our Foundation to endow this fellowship to prepare physicians for some of the most meaningful moments in medicine. Through this investment, we hope to ensure that more children and families everywhere experience expert and thoughtful care when they need it most.”