Matthew Cummings

Matthew Cummings is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in Columbia's Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine and a physician-scientist whose research sits at the intersection of infectious diseases and critical illness in sub-Saharan Africa. He earned his MD at Albany Medical College (AOA, Gold Humanism) and completed internal medicine residency, chief residency and the Pulmonary and Critical Care fellowship at Columbia (2017–2021), earning a master's in patient-oriented research during fellowship, with additional training in translational immunology at the Center for Infection and Immunity; his fellow project identified biological subtypes of sepsis in Uganda. Working with the Uganda Virus Research Institute and Max O'Donnell's group, he has defined immune and transcriptomic sepsis endotypes in Ugandan cohorts (Critical Care, AJRCCM, Intensive Care Medicine), and during the pandemic he was first author of the Lancet prospective cohort of critically ill COVID-19 adults in New York City and led parallel studies in Uganda. His work has been supported by NIAID F32, K23 and R21 awards and, since September 2024, an NIAID R01 for multidimensional longitudinal immune profiling of sepsis in Uganda; he received the ASCI Young Physician-Scientist Award in 2024 and co-leads the UVRI-Columbia Collaboration on Severe and Emerging Infections.