Mad Minute with Brandon Cummings
Describe how you first became involved with MCIRCC in your previous role and how it evolved into what you currently do in the Data Science Services department.
My initial involvement with MCIRCC was as a student – I participated in the University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) and, as luck would have it, was matched with Dr. Hakam Tiba. Under his mentorship, I worked with Amanda Pennington in the Clinical Research Unit (CRU) to screen, consent, and test patients for MCIRCC’s microvascular oximetry project. After finishing with UROP, I continued to volunteer with the CRU and became involved with the Dynamic Respiratory Impedance Volume Estimation (DRIVE) project. It was in the course of working with this bioimpedance data that I was first introduced to signal processing and programming in MATLAB, and a love of data science was born.
Given this new, developing skillset, my work with Dr. Tiba and MCIRCC began to bleed over in the Pre-Clinical Operative & Intensive Care Unit (PCOICU). In addition to working as a technician in the lab, I also worked to construct an analysis pipeline for the growing volume of data coming from projects such as Trans-Ocular Brain Impedance (TOBI), using REBOA in cardiac arrest, and MCIRCC’s large animal model of sepsis. As the PCOICU grew, my duties became more and more data-focused and integrating with the Data Science Services group became an attractive option and a natural fit.
As a data engineer here in MCIRCC’s Data Science Services department, I’m able to support the data needs of the CRU and PCOICU in addition to working alongside world-class data scientists on our data repository and state-of-the-art analytic tool, PICTURE. In these short few months, I’ve already learned so much from the team here and I look forward to learning much more!
What is most challenging about data analysis?
Volume! There are so many interesting and promising projects that could greatly benefit from data analytics; choosing where and how to most effectively invest one’s effort can be a real challenge!
In what ways have you seen your work pay off?
Watching MCIRCC’s two impedance technologies (DRIVE and TOBI) grow from a nascent bundle of wires to a spin-off company with two developing prototypes has to be one of the most gratifying processes I’ve ever experienced. From soldering the first set of electrodes to developing a real-time waveform analytic, I am proud of my contributions to the project and am grateful to have the opportunity to watch it coalesce into a tangible device.
Congratulations on recently becoming a newlywed! What are you looking forward to most as a married man?
Thank you! I’m very excited, and certainly have a lot to look forward to! One thing in particular is setting up our new apartment together – we didn’t get a chance to do any moving before the wedding, so there is still quite a bit left to do. Currently, we’re having fun building furniture and organizing the kitchen!