Dr. Abby Sung joined the Department of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases as an Assistant Professor in July 2022. She is originally from Los Angeles, CA but moved to St. Louis to complete her undergraduate education at Washington University in St. Louis, where she double majored in history and biology and wrote her thesis on the malaria eradication program by the WHO. She subsequently remained at Washington University for medical school, internal medicine residency, and infectious diseases fellowship. As a resident, she participated in research studying risk factors predicting Candida endocarditis and outcomes in patients with extrapulmonary cryptococcal disease compared with CNS disease. Currently, her clinical interests are in general infectious diseases with a special focus on infection prevention in both inpatient and outpatient settings to improve safety for patients and healthcare providers. She has received training in healthcare epidemiology by the BJH Healthcare Epidemiologists and will obtain the SHEA/CDC Training Certificate in Healthcare Epidemiology in Spring of 2022.
As a clinical fellow, she published a paper on immunocompromised patients with persistently positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR tests. Dr. Sung is also interested in medical education and is a participant of the first Washington University Teaching Physician Pathway Certificate Program for medicine sub-specialty fellows interested in becoming clinician educators. Using her experience in healthcare epidemiology, she hopes to use medical education methodology to design curricula and better educate a multidisciplinary audience on healthcare epidemiology and infection prevention. In fellowship, she was the recipient of an ID Week 2021 Trainee Travel Award by the IDSA and the Knowlton Incentive for Excellence Award by The Foundation for Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Her key Interests are infectious diseases, infection prevention, healthcare epidemiology, occupational health, and medical education Research areas: Infection prevention practices and policies in the outpatient and inpatient settings to reduce infection transmission.