About

Daniel J. Licht, MD, is an Emeritus Professor and the Chief of Neurology at Children's National Hospital. He specializes in child neurology with a focus on the care of critically ill infants and children. His clinical practice informs his research, which aims to understand how care delivery affects cerebral blood flow and brain metabolic use of oxygen. Dr. Licht utilizes non-invasive imaging techniques, including MRI and optics, to achieve high anatomical resolution and time sensitivity in his studies. His research has expanded into fetal neurology, where he has developed MRI techniques to qualitatively assess fetal brain development and monitor fetal brain health, particularly in the context of severe congenital heart defects. He is leading efforts to non-invasively image placental anatomy and function. Dr. Licht's clinical expertise includes neurological care for critically ill children, with a special interest in congenital cardiac disease, pediatric stroke, and congenital malformations such as diaphragmatic hernia. He is the only neurologist performing fetal neurology consults to optimize care for infants with congenital malformations.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Computer Security
• Data science
• Machine Learning
• Speech recognition
• Anesthesia
• Pathology
• Medicine
• Psychology
• Radiology
• Neuroscience

Selected publications

• Birth day of the week is associated with surgical timing and postoperative brain injury in neonates with congenital heart disease

  JTCVS Open · 2026-02-25

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Objectives: White matter injury (WMI) is a common neurologic complication in neonates with critical congenital heart disease (CHD) and is associated with adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. Although intraoperative and perioperative risk factors have been extensively studied, emerging evidence suggests that preoperative factors, including time from birth to surgery, may play a critical role in neurologic injury. We hypothesize that birth day of the week is associated with time to surgery and thus neurologic injury. Methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of 192 neonates born at term with critical CHD, 167 of whom underwent pre- and postoperative magnetic resonance imaging of the brain as part of a prospective observational study. The birth day of week and time to surgery were analyzed in relation to neurologic injury and patient demographics. Results: = .02). Conclusions: The day of week of birth may be an underrecognized contributor for neurologic injury in neonates with CHD. Given that surgical scheduling practices may contribute to the association between day of birth and time-to-surgery, optimizing delivery timing and surgical access may reduce the burden of WMI in this vulnerable population.

  PublisherDOI

• Intraoperative Assessment of Cerebral Autoregulation With Cerebral Oximetry Index in Neonates Undergoing Cardiac Surgery: A Pilot Study

  Journal of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia · 2025-04-18 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Neurologic Disorders in Children With Heart Disease

  Elsevier eBooks · 2025-06-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• BOUQuET : dataset, Benchmark and Open initiative for Universal Quality Evaluation in Translation

  2025-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Pierre Andrews, Mikel Artetxe, Mariano Coria Meglioli, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Joe Chuang, David Dale, Mark Duppenthaler, Nathanial Paul Ekberg, Cynthia Gao, Daniel Edward Licht, Jean Maillard, Alexandre Mourachko, Christophe Ropers, Safiyyah Saleem, Eduardo Sánchez, Ioannis Tsiamas, Arina Turkatenko, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Shireen Yates. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cerebral Microhemorrhages in Children With Congenital Heart Disease: Prevalence, Risk Factors, and Association With Neurodevelopmental Outcomes

  Journal of the American Heart Association · 2025-02-03 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Background Infants with congenital heart disease require early lifesaving heart surgery, which increases risk for brain injury and neurodevelopmental delay. Cerebral microhemorrhages (CMH) are frequently seen after surgery, but whether they are benign or constitute injury is unknown. Methods and Results One hundred ninety‐two infants with congenital heart disease undergoing cardiac surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass were evaluated with pre‐ (n=183) and/or postoperative (n=162) magnetic resonance imaging. Perioperative risk factors for CMH and neurodevelopmental outcomes were analyzed using linear regression. Eighteen‐month neurodevelopmental outcomes were assessed in a subset of patients (n=82). The most common congenital heart disease subtypes were hypoplastic left heart syndrome (37%) and transposition of the great arteries (33%). Forty‐two infants (23%) had CMH present on magnetic resonance imaging presurgery and 137 infants (85%) postsurgery. We found no significant risk factors for preoperative CMH. In multivariable analysis, neurodevelopmental duration ( P <0.0001), use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support ( P <0.0005), postoperative seizure(s) ( P =0.02), and lower birth weight ( P =0.03) were associated with new or worsened CMH postoperatively. A higher CMH number was associated with lower motor scores ( P =0.01) at 18 months. Conclusions CMH are common imaging findings in infants with congenital heart disease, particularly after cardiopulmonary bypass conferring adverse impact on neurodevelopmental outcomes at 18 months. Longer duration of cardiopulmonary bypass and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation use demonstrated greatest risk for developing CMH. However, the presence of CMH on preoperative scans indicates yet unidentified nonperioperative risk factors. Neuroprotective strategies to mitigate CMH risk may improve neurodevelopmental outcomes in this vulnerable population.

  PublisherDOI

• Joint speech and text machine translation for up to 100 languages

  Nature · 2025-01-15 · 22 citations

  articleOpen access

  Creating the Babel Fish, a tool that helps individuals translate speech between any two languages, requires advanced technological innovation and linguistic expertise. Although conventional speech-to-speech translation systems composed of multiple subsystems performing translation in a cascaded fashion exist1–3, scalable and high-performing unified systems4,5 remain underexplored. To address this gap, here we introduce SEAMLESSM4T–Massively Multilingual and Multimodal Machine Translation–a single model that supports speech-to-speech translation (101 to 36 languages), speech-to-text translation (from 101 to 96 languages), text-to-speech translation (from 96 to 36 languages), text-to-text translation (96 languages) and automatic speech recognition (96 languages). Built using a new multimodal corpus of automatically aligned speech translations and other publicly available data, SEAMLESSM4T is one of the first multilingual systems that can translate from and into English for both speech and text. Moreover, it outperforms the existing state-of-the-art cascaded systems, achieving up to 8% and 23% higher BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) scores in speech-to-text and speech-to-speech tasks, respectively. Beyond quality, when tested for robustness, our system is, on average, approximately 50% more resilient against background noise and speaker variations in speech-to-text tasks than the previous state-of-the-art systems. We evaluated SEAMLESSM4T on added toxicity and gender bias to assess translation safety. For the former, we included two strategies for added toxicity mitigation working at either training or inference time. Finally, all contributions in this work are publicly available for non-commercial use to propel further research on inclusive speech translation technologies. SEAMLESSM4T is a single machine translation tool that supports speech-to-speech translation, speech-to-text translation, text-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation and automatic speech recognition between up to 100 languages.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Verrechnungspreisdokumentationspflichten – Bestandsaufnahme, Würdigung und Reformpotenzial

  Verlag Dr. Otto Schmidt eBooks · 2025-12-31

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Author Correction: Joint speech and text machine translation for up to 100 languages

  Nature · 2025-02-03

  erratumOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Resilience in Young Adults with Congenital Heart Disease in Relation to Neurodevelopment in the Preschool Period

  The Journal of Pediatrics · 2025-07-24

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Postnatal Brain Trajectories and Maternal Intelligence Predict Childhood Outcomes in Complex CHD

  Journal of Clinical Medicine · 2024-05-15 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Objective: To determine whether early structural brain trajectories predict early childhood neurodevelopmental deficits in complex CHD patients and to assess relative cumulative risk profiles of clinical, genetic, and demographic risk factors across early development. Study Design: Term neonates with complex CHDs were recruited at Texas Children’s Hospital from 2005–2011. Ninety-five participants underwent three structural MRI scans and three neurodevelopmental assessments. Brain region volumes and white matter tract fractional anisotropy and radial diffusivity were used to calculate trajectories: perioperative, postsurgical, and overall. Gross cognitive, language, and visuo-motor outcomes were assessed with the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development and with the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence and Beery–Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual–Motor Integration. Multi-variable models incorporated risk factors. Results: Reduced overall period volumetric trajectories predicted poor language outcomes: brainstem ((β, 95% CI) 0.0977, 0.0382–0.1571; p = 0.0022) and white matter (0.0023, 0.0001–0.0046; p = 0.0397) at 5 years; brainstem (0.0711, 0.0157–0.1265; p = 0.0134) and deep grey matter (0.0085, 0.0011–0.0160; p = 0.0258) at 3 years. Maternal IQ was the strongest contributor to language variance, increasing from 37% at 1 year, 62% at 3 years, and 81% at 5 years. Genetic abnormality’s contribution to variance decreased from 41% at 1 year to 25% at 3 years and was insignificant at 5 years. Conclusion: Reduced postnatal subcortical–cerebral white matter trajectories predicted poor early childhood neurodevelopmental outcomes, despite high contribution of maternal IQ. Maternal IQ was cumulative over time, exceeding the influence of known cardiac and genetic factors in complex CHD, underscoring the importance of heritable and parent-based environmental factors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01NS072338

  NIH · $1.7M · 2017

• NIH Grant U01HD087180

  NIH · $4.3M · 2021

• NIH Grant P41RR002305

  NIH · $8.8M · 2015

• NIH Grant K23NS052380

  NIH · $664k · 2011

Frequent coauthors

• Rebecca Ichord

  Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

  333 shared

• Lauren A. Beslow

  277 shared

• Sabrina E. Smith

  271 shared

• Lori C. Jordan

  Vanderbilt University Medical Center

  193 shared

• Rachel A Bastian

  Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

  149 shared

• J. William Gaynor

  Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

  139 shared

• Nicholas S. Abend

  Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

  135 shared

• Melissa C. Gindville

  Vanderbilt University Medical Center

  133 shared

Education

• MD

  Rutgers New Jersey Medical School

  1997

• BA

  New York University

  1984