AAS Member Spotlight for February 2021 – Vanessa Nomellini, MD PhD

Each month, the AAS Membership Committee presents the “Membership Spotlight” – an opportunity to introduce you to a member of your association.

Article by Jennifer Plichta, MD MS

Vanessa Nomellini, MD PhD serves as the Director for the ICU Recovery Program at the University of Cincinnati. After obtaining her MD and PhD in Biochemistry at Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine, she then completed her General Surgery Residency at the University of Wisconsin and the Critical Care Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. She is board certified in General Surgery and Surgical Critical Care. She joined the Department of Surgery at the University of Cincinnati in 2016. She is an active member of AAS and currently serves on the Basic and Translational Science Committee.

Her clinical practice focuses on trauma, acute care surgery, and critical care with a special emphasis on chronic critical illness and prolonged ICU recovery. She instituted the ICU Recovery Program at the UC Medical Center in order to improve outcomes for this highly complex patient population. She also serves as the Surgical ICU representative to the Pulmonary Embolism Response Team, whose mission is to provide a multidisciplinary team that responds immediately to patients anywhere in the hospital or at referring hospitals who develop a life-threatening pulmonary embolism.

Dr. Nomellini is also active in basic science and translational research. Her lab is focused on the immune dysfunction that can happen in response to injury and infection, also referred to as the Persistent Inflammation, Immunosuppression, and Catabolism Syndrome (PICS). She has published numerous manuscripts and has received funding from the NIH to investigate how the immune system can be dysfunctional after injury or infection. In addition, she has active clinical trials examining this in humans, with the goal of developing personalized immune therapies to reverse the immunosuppression that can occur in ICU survivors.