ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Nadim Mahmud, MD, MS, MPH, MSCE is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), where he serves as a Transplant Hepatologist in his third year on faculty. While Dr. Mahmud has a strong interest in patient care and manage patients at both Penn and the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, he is invested in a clinician-scientist career. After completing a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology at Penn, Dr. Mahmud joined faculty, received an American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) Junior Faculty Development Grant and a National Institutes of Health K08 Award. As a fellow he recognized that patients with cirrhosis had significant post-operative risk, however the tools available to risk stratify and counsel patients had major limitations and were outdated. The focus of his ACG and K08 awards was to address this gap by developing a novel risk prediction model from a large dataset of patients with cirrhosis undergoing diverse surgeries. Working with multi-institutional collaborators, he derived a tool called the VOCAL-Penn Score in the Veterans Health Administration, and subsequently externally validated this tool in two independent health systems. This tool accurately predicted post-operative mortality and hepatic decompensation in patients with cirrhosis across different classes of major surgeries. As a testament to the clinical impact of the VOCAL-Penn Score, it has been used by over 18,000 unique users around the globe to assist in risk stratification in the past 12 months. Building on this experience, Dr. Mahmud has subsequently deepened his expertise in risk prediction modeling, pharmacoepidemiology, and causal inference methodology. This has allowed him to explore diverse research questions pertaining to management of patients with chronic liver disease, and to date he has published over 90 peer-reviewed manuscripts, many in high-impact journals such as JAMA Surgery, Gastroenterology, Journal of Hepatology, JAMA Internal Medicine, and Hepatology.