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The mission of the Division of Infectious Disease and International Medicine is to be an internationally outstanding academic center. Our faculty members conduct research, analyze policy, deliver clinical care, and provide specialized training to healthcare providers locally, nationally and internationally. Our goal is to be a resource for infectious disease identification, prevention and treatment issues, including bioterrorism and the emergence of new pathogens.
Kami Kim, MD, FACP Szentivanyi Professor of Medicine Director
Dr. Sherbuk’s research interests focus on outcomes research related to HIV, Hepatitis C, and structural determinants of health. During fellowship, Dr. Sherbuk served as co-investigator for an investigator-initiated grant aiming for micro-elimination of hepatitis C in Southwest Virginia. During her medical school training, Dr. Sherbuk spent one year dedicated to research on biomarkers of Chagas cardiomyopathy in Santa Cruz, Bolivia under the mentorship of Robert Gilman, MD, Johns Hopkins University and Caryn Bern, MD MPH with the University of California San Francisco.
Dr. Sherbuk will join the teaching team at Tampa General Hospital and will be involved in clinical care at the Department of Health – Hillsborough County.
Division of Infectious Disease director, Dr. Kami Kim is a member of the innovative team that responded to the national shortage of swabs and collection kits needed for COVID-19 testing by creating 3D printed swabs from surgical grade plastic. The initial supply was created for USF Health and Tampa General Hospital clinicians and quickly evolved to a much bigger scope with thousands of swabs being distributed for national and international use. City of Tampa Mayor, Jane Castor, recently recognized the efforts at USF Health by selecting the team for the COVID-19 Heroes of Tampa Bay Award.
Dr. Kim is also the PI for the clinical research study that is comparing the performance of 3D printed swabs compared to standard flocked swabs in collection of nasopharyngeal samples needed.
Dr. McSkimming joins our ID Research team as director of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Core. His long-term research interests focus on comprehensively understanding how microbes interact with host genetics and their environment to influence our health.
As the director of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Core, some of Dr. McSkimming’s goals will include:
She is a member of the Infectious Disease Society of America, the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America and a member of the American College of Physicians. We have seen first-hand her dedication to academia, research and the practice of medicine and look forward to the contributions she will make to our division.
Dr. Katzman will join our ID team at Moffitt Cancer Center and will be our new Assistant Program Director for the ID Fellowship Program.
Friday, June 12th the USF Division of Infectious Disease and International Medicine’s Infectious Disease Fellowship Program held it’s graduation ceremony - virtually! It was the first time in the program’s 46 years that the commencement ceremony was conducted virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty, staff, fellows and the fellows’ family and friends were able to login to participate in this virtual event. Fellowship program director Dr. Beata Casanas led the ceremony and Dr. Kami Kim, division director and Dr. John Sinnott, chairman of Internal Medicine both addressed the graduates during the ceremony. Graduating fellow Dr. Greg Teo was presented this year’s Jeffrey P. Nadler, MD, FACP Award for Research Excellence and graduate, Dr. Ju Hee Kim was presented with the Outstanding Infectious Disease Fellow Award from the James A. Haley VA Hospital ID team.
The ID division has been busy with clinical and basic research on COVID-19 while responding to the pandemic at our clinical sites. Dr. Kami Kim has collaborated with the Tampa General Hospital CLIA laboratory to create a biorepository of samples from COVID-19 patients. With Dr. Tom Unnasch and Dr. John Adams of the USF College of Public Health (COPH) and Dr. Michael Teng of the Morsani College of Medicine (MCOM), Dr. Kim has set up a BSL2-BSL3 laboratory in the Interdisciplinary Research Building to study COVID-19 antibodies and COVID-19 viral pathogenesis. Drs. Kim, Unnasch, Adams and Teng will work together on the project “Serological Correlates to Immunity in SARS-CoV-2 Infection", which was funded by the USF Pandemic Response Research Network.
This project will examine human SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and development of immunity to determine the best criteria to determine whether a person is immune to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This work was featured on Tampa Bay's New Channel 8.
Dr. Kim also is the PI for the clinical research study that is comparing the performance of 3D printed swabs compared to standard flocked swabs in collection of nasopharyngeal samples needed to diagnosis COVID-19 infection. There has been a national shortage of swabs and collection kits needed for COVID-19 testing. A team led by Dr. Summer Decker printed 3D swabs from surgical grade plastic to supply this critical need for USF and TGH clinicians. This was featured in the national and local press, click here to see the feature with the Tampa Bay Times.
For more information about COVID-19 research across USF Health - click here.
Congratulations to Liwang Cui, PhD, his lab, and their malaria research collaborators in the USF Global Health Infectious Diseases Research Center (GHIDR) on their recent publication in the May 9 issue of Journal of Infectious Diseases: Lineage-specific Expansion of Plasmodium Falciparum Parasites With pfhrp2 Deletion in the Greater Mekong Subregion. Dr. Justin Gibbons of USF GHIDR was the lead author and Dr. Jun Miao and Dr. Kami Kim of the ID Division contributed to the collaboration.
Link to full journal article.
Schematics showing the positions of deletions of pfhrp2 from 138 clinical samples collected from the China-Myanmar border area. A, Positions of the 2 breakpoints at and near pfhrp2. B, Normalized coverage in the pfhrp2 region from 10 random samples without pfhrp2 deletions. C, Normalized coverage in the pfhrp2 region for the breakpoint 1 samples. D, Normalized coverage in the pfhrp2 region for the breakpoint 2 samples. Vertical dotted lines indicate the location of the pfhrp2 gene.
Beginning March 30, 2020, the USF Department of Internal Medicine teamed up with the Division of Infectious Disease and the Florida Department of Health – Hillsborough to create the COVID-19 Confirmed Follow Up Clinic (COCO), a network of healthcare providers to provide ambulatory care for patients who have tested positive for COVID-19. The program offers patients the option of home management of the virus to prevent hospitalization or re-admission to the hospital. Dr. Asa Oxner, Vice Chair for the Department of Internal Medicine and Dr. Elimarys Perez-Colon, Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics are co-directors of the project.
This network of providers uses telehealth visits to assess, monitor and treat patients for COVID-19. During video visits, patients receive full medical assessment, including prescription of necessary medications, and in some cases are provided pulse oximeters to closely track their heart rate and oxygen levels. The team continues to monitor the patient’s vitals throughout the course of the disease. For the sickest patients, in-person care may be arranged at an isolation clinic with trained staff and USF physicians.
The COCO program encompasses not only the clinical care of the patient, but provides connections with home care companies, behavioral health clinicians and other resources for social support. If interested, patients may also be referred to clinical trials and participate in research.
As of today our physicians in the COCO network have cared for over 750 COVID-19 positive patients, with more than 550 patients being “cleared” of the virus. The program continues to get an average of 20 new referrals and 20 follow up visits per day.
To support this and other USF efforts in COVID-19 response, please click here.
To schedule an appointment to get tested for COVID-19, link to care with us if you have already tested positive, or to see if you are eligible for one of our clinical trials: call 813-974-7616. You will need to register with USF Health and sign new patient forms electronically.
Related media articles: WTSP - 10 Tampa Bay, Univision Tampa Bay
This year's recipient, Dr. Attiya Harit was presented this award for her commitment to her academic career and
her compassion to help the underserved. Her
research includes being a PI on two projects at Kasturba Medical Hospital Manipal, Karnataka, India. Most notably, a project
on the correlation between fluorescence in stiu hybridization
(FISH) and immuno-histochemistry – the (IHC) analysis for HER2/Neu status. She
was also Co-Investigator for the project “Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice
of Influenza Vaccination Among Healthcare Professionals” in
India. As a SELECT student, she also worked on the team-based
research project- Improving Patient Nasal Rise Comprehension
and Compliance with Instruction Cards for Chronic Sinusitis and
Post-Endoscopic Surgery Care: Otolaryngology Department, USF Health.
She volunteered with Tampa Bay Street Medicine and Project World Health
at USF and was president of the Internal Medicine Interest
Group.
Dr. Harit will be doing her Internal Medicine Residency at George Washington University and has chosen the public health and underserved concentration there.
We welcome Dr. Anthony Cannella as a new Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Disease and International Medicine. Dr. Cannella is a USF alumnus, graduating from the USF Morsani College of Medicine in 2006. He completed his internal medicine residency at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2009 where he received awards for both his research as well as teaching. He then completed both a clinical ID fellowship (2011) and a post-doctoral ID fellowship (2013) at the University of California, San Diego; there he obtained an NIH Diversity Award which funded him for two years on his adaptive immunology research of Brucella melitensis. In 2013 he became faculty at UCSD and was awarded an NIH (NIAID) K08 grant to study the innate and adaptive T cell responses of Plasmodium falciparum.
He was recruited to the University of Florida College of Medicine (2014) to work at the Emerging Pathogens Institute; there he authored senior authored manuscripts, received accolades for both teaching and mentoring as well as having the opportunity to be part of the UFCOM medical admissions process. He also started the UF Travel Clinic, Non-tuberculous mycobacteria clinic, worked in hospital epidemiology for both UF Health and the Malcolm Randall VAMC as well as starting the UF Outpatient Parental Antimicrobial Therapy (OPAT) program.
Dr. Cannella has now returned home to where he first learned medicine and will be part of the Hospital Epidemiology and Antimicrobial Stewardship Programs at the James A. Haley VAMC, as well as joining the Moffitt Cancer Center ID team. In his spare time, he enjoys boxing, culinary arts and spending time with his wife and two young sons.
The Healthcare Worker Exposure Response and Outcomes (HERO) study was recently funded by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and will be led by the Duke Clinical Research Institute in response to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The study will focus on the healthcare workers who are at high risk of contracting this novel coronavirus. It will engage healthcare workers across the nation to understand the impact of COVID-19 on their health and to evaluate whether or not hydroxychloroquine can prevent COVID-19 infections.
USF Infectious Disease doctors Kami Kim, MD and Seetha Lakshmi, MD have worked closely with Tampa General Hospital (TGH) administrators and the OneFlorida consortium to submit their proposal for participation in this important study. As a result of their hard work, TGH has been selected as one of 16 prominent healthcare facilities across the country to participate in the study. Dr. Lakshmi will act as lead investigator for the TGH site.
Click here to learn more about this study.
COVID-19 Research & Response Fund
Learn about our Fellowship rotation sites.
Read alumni comments on the Fellowship Program page.
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