Dr. Ariagno is Professor of Pediatrics, Emeritus at Stanford University School of Medicine in the Division of Neonatal and Developmental Medicine. He has been on the faculty at Stanford University since 1975. He received his medical degree from University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago and pediatric training at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago. His neonatology fellowship was at the University of California San Francisco and Children’s Hospital of San Francisco under Dr. June Brady (1973-75).

He has served on the Executive Committee of the Section on Perinatal Pediatrics (SoPPe) now the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Section on Neonatal and Perinatal Medicine (SONPM, re-named 2016) since 1994. SONPM liaison to Section on Advances in Therapeutics and Technology (2016). He was appointed Chair of the Research Committee, organized and led the Marshall Klaus Perinatal Research Award for Fellows in Neonatal–Perinatal Medicine Program from 2004-14. He was the organizing Chair and first president of the California Association of Neonatologists (CAN) in 1995 and the first American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) SoPPe District IX Chair of the combined CAN/AAP organization. At Stanford University he chairs one of the Human Subjects in Medical Research Review Committees (2004-). He has been a Certified Simulation Instructor in “Center for Advanced Pediatric Education” (CAPE) directed by L. Halamek, for simulation and neonatal resuscitation and Co-Director of the CAPE Neonatal Resuscitation Simulation Training Program and served as faculty from 2011-18. Appointed to FDA Pediatric Advisory Committee as member of the Neonatology Sub-Committee to support and facilitate the basic neonatal science needed and to promote the development of drug and new devices for infants (2013-). From 2013-15 he was appointed as Senior Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Senior Faculty Fellow in Neonatology in the Office of Pediatric Therapeutics and in the Maternal and Pediatric Section, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the FDA to represent neonatology and to help strategize how to facilitate the basic neonatal science research needed and to promote the development of drug and new devices for infants. He was invited participant in a working group in DC to represent the SONPM to develop a global pediatric trials network (2014), which later became the Institute for Advanced Clinical Trials in Children (2017). He had an Intergovernmental Personnel Act Agreement with Stanford University appointment as a neonatology consult and had office at the US Food and Drug Administration in the Office of Pediatric Therapeutics from 2015-17. He served as Special Government Employee (SGE) for the FDA as a neonatology consultant 2017-19. He was Chair of a Task Force for Neonatal Perinatal Therapeutic Development for the Section on Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine (2015-20) and Co-Chair of Research in the Section on Advances in Therapeutics and Technology (2015-2020) at the American Academy of Pediatrics. Member of the Institute for Advanced Clinical Trials in Children (I-ACT; iact.org; established in 2017 as a non-profit institute to work with public and private stakeholders to enable research and education on innovative treatments to enhance healthcare for children). He is an active and contributing member of the International Neonatal Consortium (INC; c-path.org/programs/inc/), which was launched on May 19, 2015, as a global collaboration to forge a predictable regulatory path for evaluating the safety and effectiveness of therapies for neonates. He currently serves on the CAN Board as "Of Counsel" and Co-Chair of the California Neonatal Intensive Care and Neonatologists Web-Directory. He is participating in the Emeritus Faculty Mentor program for junior faculty (2020-). Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford 2022.