Sam Windham, MD MSCI

Professional Background

Dr. Sam Windham is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Kansas Medical Center, with a joint appointment in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. Clinically, he practices transplant infectious diseases and critical care medicine, attending on the Transplant ID consult service and the Medical ICU. His research program focuses on using electronic health record data and causal inference methods to understand sepsis, septic shock, and infection in immunocompromised patients, a population routinely excluded from clinical trials and underserved by existing treatment evidence.
Dr. Windham completed his undergraduate medical training at the University of Missouri and his internal medicine residency at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He trained in infectious diseases at the University of Colorado and completed a critical care medicine fellowship and NIH T32 postdoctoral research fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also earned a Master's in Clinical Investigation. He holds Epic Data Architect and Data Scientist certifications and is currently a KL2 Scholar through the Frontiers Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

• MD, Medicine, University of Missouri
• MS, Informatics, Washington University
• Residency, Internal Medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin
• Clinical Fellowship, Infectious Diseases, University of Colorado
• Clinical Fellowship, Critical Care Medicine, Washington University
• Post Doctoral Fellowship, Neutropenic Septic Shock, Washington University

Research

Overview

The category "immunocompromised" as used in critical care and infectious diseases is biologically incoherent. Patients grouped under that label share neither a mechanism nor a treatment response, yet pivotal sepsis trials routinely exclude them or pool them into a single post hoc subgroup. Neutropenic septic shock carries approximately 54% mortality, and yet pressor choice, corticosteroid use, and antimicrobial strategy in this population are guided by almost no trial-derived evidence.
Dr. Windham's research program breaks "immunocompromised" into biologically coherent phenotypes and uses those phenotypes to enable the trials that do not yet exist. The work proceeds along three tracks: (1) derivation and validation of bedside-identifiable phenotypes of sepsis and infection in immunocompromised hosts using granular EHR data, currently focused on neutropenic septic shock and hematopoietic cell transplant recipients; (2) application of causal inference methods, including target trial emulation, to large-scale federated EHR data (Epic COSMOS, >280 US health systems) to estimate treatment effects across phenotypes; and (3) development of an in silico pipeline that uses these methods to de-risk future comparative effectiveness trials in the immunocompromised population, generating phenotype-specific effect-size estimates, power calculations, and feasibility signals before a trial is launched.
The program is supported by grants from the American Thoracic Society Foundation, the Kansas Institutional Program of Medicine COBRE, Frontiers CTSA (KL2), and active clinical trial collaborations with AstraZeneca and GEN1E Life Sciences.

• Short vs Long Courses of Antibiotics in Febrile Neutropenia Post-Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant, Frontiers CTSA

• Windham S, Hirsch K, Peterson R, Douin D, Chauhan L, Heery L, Fling C, Vukovic N, Holguin F, Zimmer S, Erlandson K. 2021. The Predictive Potential of Elevated Serum Inflammatory Markers in Determining the Need for Intubation in CoVID-19 Patients.. Journal of critical care medicine (Universitatea de Medicina si Farmacie din Targu-Mures), 8 (1), 14-22
• Windham S, Wilson MP, Fling C, Sheneman D, Wand T, Babcock L, MaWhinney S, Erlandson KM. 2021. Elevated glycohemoglobin is linked to critical illness in CoVID-19: a retrospective analysis.. Therapeutic advances in infectious disease, 8, 20499361211027390