Cindy Hsu, MD, PhD, MS, FCCM
Division Chief of Critical Care, Department of Emergency Medicine
Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine
Assistant Professor, Acute Care Surgery
734-764-3691
hcindy@umich.edu
Administrative Contact: Cindy Trafford (ctraffor@med.umich.edu)
View profile on U-M Department of Emergency Medicine website
Dr. Cindy Hsu is an emergency medicine physician and surgical intensivist who cares for patients in Michigan Medicine’s Adult Emergency Department, Emergency Critical Care Center, and Trauma/Burn Intensive Care Unit. Dr. Hsu received her undergraduate degree from the Johns Hopkins University and MD/PhD degree from Boston University School of Medicine with a doctoral degree in Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics and Biomedical Neuroscience. She then completed her emergency medicine residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania followed by trauma/surgical critical care fellowship at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. Wanting to bridge the translational gap between bench and bedside, she completed a master’s degree in Clinical Trial Design & Statistical Analysis at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Dr. Hsu is among the first in her specialty to hold dual certifications in emergency medicine and surgical critical care. As such, she is uniquely poised to impact the care of critical ill patients from the moment they arrive in the emergency department through their stay in the intensive care units.
Dr. Hsu strives to transform cardiac arrest care by dismantling the gaps between translational research and clinical implementation, with an emphasis on improving the neurologic outcome of cardiac arrest patients. Her research has spanned from large animal models to clinical trials of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and other acute conditions, to mixed methods research on emergency trial conducts. Dr. Hsu has dedicated significant time as an NHLBI K12 Scholar developing large animal cardiac arrest models to study neuroprotective therapies after cardiac arrest such as high-dose valproic acid, with plan to translate these findings to early phase clinical trials. The significance of her work was recognized by a NINDS R61/33 Innovation Grant to Nurture Initial Translational Efforts(link is external), which will enable her team to overcome the translational barrier of existing long-term models by developing a clinically relevant and cost-effective short-term cardiac arrest swine model of severe brain injury. Dr. Hsu also serves as a co-investigator for the Strategies to Innovate Emergency Care Clinical Trials Network (SIREN)(link is external) Clinical Coordinating Center as well as the site principal investigator for several multicenter cardiac arrest clinical trials such as ICECAP(link is external). She has been actively involved in the creation of resuscitation guidelines as a member on the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation’s Advanced Life Support Task Force and the American Heart Association’s Emergency Cardiovascular Care Science Subcommittee. Her accomplishments in cardiac arrest research has been recognized by several national awards including the 2019 Society of Academic Emergency Medicine Academy for Women in Academic Emergency Medicine Early Career Award, 2020 AHA Resuscitation Science Symposium Young Investigator Award, and 2022 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Early Investigator Award.