Vinod Kumar, PhD

Department of Genetics, UMCG

University Medical Center Groningen

Groningen, Netherlands

Research interests:

The International Sepsis Forum (ISF) a non-profit public American charity with a mission to improve outcomes for patients with sepsis. Its award gives the recipient USD 500 and the opportunity to present their work orally during the ISF/ECCMID joint session.

This year’s winner is Vinod Kumar from the Department of Genetics at the University of Groningen. He submitted an abstract about a functional genomics approach to identify novel susceptibility pathways for fungal infections.  In his research, Vinod aims to identify human genes and molecular mechanisms that regulate appropriate immune responses and may contribute to susceptibility to sepsis and other infectious diseases. As traditional approaches to find causal genes for sepsis and other infectious diseases have not been very successful, Vinod and colleagues take advantage of state-of-the-art technologies, simultaneously assessing genetics, transcriptomics and immune-profiling in the context of host-pathogen interaction using population-based cohorts and integrating obtained data with patient-genetics. Vinod is discovering new avenues for further investigation targeted drug discovery for sepsis.