Dr. DeBaun is director of the Sickle Cell Medical Treatment and Education Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital. The Center is a regional referral center for children with sickle cell disease and provides multi-disciplinary medical care and education to more than 350 children and their families.

Dr. DeBaun’s efforts regarding hematology have focused on understanding the etiology, pathogenesis and management of cerebrovascular injury in children with sickle cell disease. He was among the first clinical investigators to document carefully the epidemiology, cognitive and clinical significance of silent cerebral infarcts in children with sickle cell anemia and to demonstrate that both size and location of cerebral infarcts result in specific cognitive loss in children.  With his leadership, these studies subsequently led to the basis of the first international clinical trial in sickle cell disease, Silent Cerebral Infarct Multi-Center Trial. The overall goal of the trial is to determine whether blood transfusion therapy will decrease further neurological morbidity in children with silent cerebral infarcts, and if so, the magnitude of this benefit. This award is the largest ever received by a pediatrician at Washington University School of Medicine. The grant will allow Dr. DeBaun and the international team of investigators to better understand the genetic basis of sickle cell disease and to find the best treatment for children who have silent strokes – a devastating effect of the disease. In oncology, Dr. DeBaun has focused on understanding the epidemiology, optimal management and molecular basis for overgrowth syndromes associated with cancer in children, specifically Beckwith Wiedemann Syndrome (BWS). Dr. DeBaun established an international BWS registry. His work has elucidated the epidemiology of cancer risk and has provided the first evidence based guidelines for cancer screening in this population. The clinical work has been coupled with careful molecular genetic analysis documenting phenotype and epigenotype correlations in BWS. Dr. DeBaun and his colleagues were the first to describe the association between in vitro fertilization (IVF), congenital malformation syndromes and epigenotype mutations in children born after IVF.

Dr. DeBaun is the program director of the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship Program, which is a part of the Medical Research Program of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The Doris Duke fellowship at Washington University provides medical students the opportunity to perform clinical research for at least one year under the guidance of a facility mentor and advisory committee. It includes a stipend, health insurance, travel allowance, book allowance, written and oral defense of thesis (for Washington University medical students only), attendance at the annual fellowship meeting, and modest support for the fellow's mentor.