Tara M. Neumayr, MD, has been appointed as the medical director of the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU) at St. Louis Children’s Hospital after serving as interim medical director since January 2024.
“I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity to serve as the medical director of the CICU, and I’m excited about the work ahead!” Neumayr said. “The Heart Center has been my professional home for over a decade now, and its ongoing development and success mean so much to me. I look forward to partnering with our patients and families as well as all the incredible people who make up our care team to make a difference in the lives of our heart patients.”
Neumayr is an associate professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis with the Department of Pediatrics, divisions of Critical Care Medicine and Nephrology, Hypertension and Apheresis. Additionally, she is the medical co-director of the Acute Kidney Replacement Therapy Program, an associate program director for the Pediatric Critical Care Medicine Fellowship Program, the director of the Advanced Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Training Program, and the Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Consortium (PC4) clinical champion for St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Neumayr was elected to the PC4 Executive Committee in 2024.
Before joining WashU Medicine as faculty, she completed medical education in her home state of South Dakota at the University of South Dakota, followed by a pediatrics residency at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She came to WashU Medicine in 2006 for combined pediatric critical care and pediatric nephrology training. She then became the first trainee at WashU Medicine to complete an advanced fellowship in the Cardiac Critical Care Program. After graduating from the program in 2012, Neumayr joined the Department of Pediatrics faculty, serving initially as a primary cardiac intensivist for three years before establishing herself as an attending on the pediatric nephrology service in 2015. Since that time, her clinical time has been split between the CICU and the pediatric nephrology inpatient service, reflecting her interest in acute care nephrology, acute kidney injury (AKI), fluid management in critically ill patients and renal replacement.
Neumayr’s clinical and research interest is the intersection of AKI and critical illness in children with a particular focus on children with congenital and acquired critical heart disease. She has published on the epidemiology of AKI after cardiac arrest, AKI identification and management after cardiac surgery in children, kidney function in children on ventricular assist devices, technical aspects of providing kidney replacement therapy to critically ill children — the use of citrate anticoagulation protocols and bivalirudin dosing for children on ECMO and CRRT —, methods of assessing fluid balance in children after cardiac surgery, and programmatic aspects of acute kidney replacement therapy delivery. She has been honored to be part of the Pediatric Acute Disease Quality Initiative Collaborative (the 26th ADQI conference), the Neonatal and Pediatric Heart and Renal Outcomes Network through PC4, and the Worldwide Exploration of Renal Replacement Outcomes Collaborative in Kidney Disease.
Neumayr is married to Rob Neumayr, MD, and is the proud (and busy!) mother of two children, Ryan (age 11 years/6th grade) and Emma (age 6 years/1st grade).