Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading IT consulting and business solutions organisation, has donated 5,000 pro bono technical and scientific research hours to Seattle Children’s Center for Integrative Brain Research, in a collaborative effort to discover the causes of sudden unexpected infant deaths (SUID), which includes sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
Seattle Children’s is one of the top five pediatric research centres in the United States. A portion of the pro bono hours committed by TCS has already been used for building a digital fundraising platform, “First Steps for SIDS”, to raise awareness and research funds for Seattle Children’s. Additional projects will be announced in the coming months. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in the US, roughly 6 out of 1,000 children die before their first birthday. Of these, about 4,000 infants, or 1 in 6, die each year of unexpected causes. Within this larger umbrella, SIDS remains the leading cause of death among children from one month to one year of age, with 90 per cent of SIDS deaths occurring within the first six months of life.
“This is an incredibly generous donation by TCS and its employees,” said John Kahan, president of the Aaron Matthew SIDS Research Guild at Seattle Children’s Hospital, whose son, Aaron, died of SIDS in 2003. “We are deeply grateful for TCS’ commitment to this work to ensure that, in the future, no parent experiences the loss of a child again or worries theirs will be next.” Kahan is also chief data analytics officer, corporate, external, and legal affairs at Microsoft.
“At TCS, we firmly believe in leveraging technology to provide solutions to social causes, and we are excited to work with Microsoft and Seattle Children’s to bring together our diverse skills to help solve SIDS,” said Nagaraj Ijari, VP and global head, HiTech Unit, TCS. “I am hopeful that the power of digital technologies, particularly analytics and cloud computing, will help researchers get closer to the answers they have been seeking for so long, and to save precious little lives.”
“This partnership will significantly accelerate and augment the cross-disciplinary research we’re doing to understand the possible causes of SIDS,” said Dr Nino Ramirez, director, Integrative Brain Research Center, Seattle Children’s.
