ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2024
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
Sivasubramanium Bhavani, MD, MS, is a physician-scientist and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Emory University in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. He completed his internal medicine residency at Baylor College of Medicine, and Pulmonary and Critical Care fellowship at University of Chicago, where he concurrently completed a T32 research fellowship and a Master of Science in Public Health. Dr. Bhavani’s research program focuses on a question that has hindered sepsis management for decades: How do we move from a one-size-fits-all approach to a precision medicine approach to treating sepsis? The proposed solution is to deconstruct the heterogenous syndrome of sepsis into distinct subphenotypes, each with potentially different responses to different treatments. Dr. Bhavani’s research centers on identifying these treatment-responsive sepsis subphenotypes by applying machine learning algorithms to routine bedside vital signs that are available even in low-resource settings.
Dr. Bhavani’s work has received support from the American Thoracic Society, NIGMS, NSF, and the AI Humanity Initiative at Emory University. His work on temperature and vital signs in sepsis has led to first-author publications in JAMA, Intensive Care Medicine, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, and CHEST. Through his K23, Dr. Bhavani has developed the vitals trajectory subphenotypes, the first-ever discovery of a precision medicine approach to crystalloid fluid resuscitation in patients with sepsis. The algorithm is being implemented as a clinical decision support tool in the electronic medical record across the Emory Healthcare system to prospectively study the effect of a precision medicine approach to fluid resuscitation in patients with sepsis. Dr. Bhavani’s vision is to translate the machine learning algorithms developed in his lab from paper to practice, and to evaluate the implementation-effectiveness of these algorithms in guiding precision treatment and improving the outcomes of critically ill patients.