My clinical interests are the infectious complications of patients with cancer treated in the University of Maryland Greenebaum Cancer Center. Cancer patients may be treated with chemotherapy, immune modulators or bone marrow/stem cell transplantation. The host immune system is impaired to varying degrees depending on the type of malignancy and the way in which it is treated. The most profoundly immunosuppressed cancer patients are frequently infected, often by pathogens that are not virulent to people defended by normal immune systems.

My academic interests are development of methods to optimize treatment of infections in complicated neutropenic patients and in bone marrow/stem cell transplant recipients. The complexity of infection management in these patients defies standard drug/bug models since patients must often be treated empirically for some time before it is possible to make accurate diagnoses. These patients are best treated through algorithm-driven treatment models where treatment choices are reevaluated repeatedly as diagnostic testing data and observations of patients responses are used to refine the initial approaches and to arrive at the best outcomes.