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
Matthew Cummings, MD, MS is a pulmonary/critical care physician-scientist who studies the molecular pathobiology of sepsis and other infection-related critical illness in sub-Saharan Africa. He received his MD from Albany Medical College and completed his residency, chief residency, and pulmonary/critical care fellowship at Columbia University. As part of his fellowship, Dr. Cummings received a Master’s degree in patient-oriented research/biostatistics and completed additional training in translational immunology at Columbia’s Center for Infection and Immunity. Now, as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia, Dr. Cummings’ leads a Uganda-based research program that seeks to illuminate the molecular pathobiology of sepsis in sub-Saharan Africa, a low-income region where the global sepsis burden is overwhelmingly concentrated yet profoundly understudied. The ultimate goal of Dr. Cummings’ research is to develop precise, effective, and locally-relevant treatment strategies for sepsis in this context. Integrating high-dimensional immune profiling and data science methods, his work has uncovered novel molecular sepsis subtypes in Uganda, elucidated the impact of HIV co-infection on sepsis immunopathology, and informed development of a novel clinicomolecular triage approach to stratify sepsis in sub-Saharan Africa. During peaks of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City and East Africa, Dr. Cummings led the first prospective studies to define the clinical epidemiology of severe/critical COVID-19 in the U.S. and Uganda and served as a co-investigator for international clinical trials of convalescent plasma and hyperimmune globulin in severe COVID-19. His work has been supported by K23 and R21 awards from NIH/NIAID and a Postdoctoral Fellowship Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund/American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Clinically, Dr. Cummings attends in the medical intensive care unit at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where he recently received the Ewig Clinical Scholar Award for excellence in clinical teaching.