Member Spotlight: Grant Paulsen

Grant Paulsen, MD, is Associate Professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. He earned his medical degree at the University of Colorado and conducted his residency at the University of North Carolina. He then completed a Med-Peds fellowship at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

Dr. Paulsen is the chair of the Training Programs Subcommittee which is part of the Workforce Development Committee where he is an At-Large member. In addition, he serves as PIDS liaison to the CDC’s Advisory Council on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

Why Pediatric ID? My path to pediatric ID would generously be best described as meandering. I graduated from college with a degree in Architectural Engineering and worked in engineering for a couple of years before heading back to the classroom with medical school as my goal. At the time, while I found learning about the different infections fascinating, I really wasn’t fully differentiated into peds ID. Lots of paths caught my attention, but I was finally able to ‘narrow’ my focus to a combined Med/Peds residency. 

During residency, I continued to be most interested in both the wide scope of infections and the fact that it was one of the few paths where I could take care of patients and often ‘fix’ their problem. I still had a bit of a decision-making disorder, so chose to complete a Med-Peds ID fellowship at UAB. During that time, I came to realize that I most enjoyed taking care of children – it’s possible that my wife recognized I was easier to be around when I was on pediatrics – and I didn’t look back. I felt then, and still feel now, that taking care of children and their families while they are dealing with a serious or complicated infection that I can help with, really is the best job in the world. 

Where have you taken your ID focus? We’re not talking about COVID right? I still have a bit of an issue closing doors to things that I find interesting, so I wear a few hats, like many of us in peds ID. My clinical focus is on immunocompromised hosts, which is a population of patients, families, and colleagues that I love to be a part of. When I’m not on service or in clinic, my research efforts focus on early-stage clinical trials to advance new pediatric and adult vaccine candidates, and over the last few years I’ve been able to become more involved with peds ID trainees. 

When I first started working at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Bev Connelly encouraged me to join her working with the fellowship program and suggested that I look into the PIDS Training Program Committee. Like many of us in peds ID, the opportunity to educate trainees was a significant draw to the specialty and something that I was interested in continuing. I’m now the Fellowship Program Director for the amazing group of fellows we have here at Cincinnati Children’s and have been lucky to be a part of the PIDS Training Program Subcommittee for the past several years. I’ve also stuck around long enough to become the chair, which allows me to continue to work with the amazing group of PIDS members that volunteer their time to help improve the quality of peds ID fellowship training for all of us. 

What is a recent development in peds ID you are working on? There are a few that come to mind, both from my work in early-stage vaccine clinical trials and my work with the Society. One is a recent study of a Phase 1 hantavirus vaccine trial, done collaboratively with the Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Units (VTEU) through the NIH. It was a clinical trial of a new DNA vaccine developed by a researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases as an early step in the potential development of a 3-valent hantavirus vaccine that could someday be offered to adults stationed in other countries at risk for exposure to hantaviruses. I realize it’s a pretty obscure virus, but I’ve learned that I enjoy working on obscure, or emerging, viruses and how to prevent infections from them in children and adults.  

In addition to being the chair of the training programs subcommittee, I’m also the PIDS liaison to ACIP. I sit in on their meetings and offer comment when necessary and then work with PIDS member Sean O’Leary and two other associate liaisons, Claudia Gaviria Agudelo and Alexandra Yonts. We write up the ACIP meeting summaries, such as the June 2024 meeting summary.

Finally, I’m also very proud to be working with the Training Program Subcommittee and the entire PIDS team to help put on the PIDS IDWeek Pediatric Fellows’ Day program. A lot of trainees seem to appreciate it, and I’m focused on keeping it a great event going forward. As part of that subcommittee and the larger Workforce Development Committee we continue to spread the word on the meetID program. I think meetID is one of the best tools we have in active use to encourage interest in our specialty. I’m proud to be part of that group, and we also put together the agenda for a trainee-focused pre-conference workshop that will stand in for meetID for PAS in April.  

What do you enjoy most about being a PIDS member? I feel like I’m going to echo what past member spotlights say: it’s really about the people. Both those who work for PIDS – the amazing PIDS staff – and all the PIDS members that I get to work with to pull off amazing events like Fellows’ Day at IDWeek. Selfishly, I think it’s the most collegial group I’ve had the opportunity to work with and everyone is focused on how we can all improve our subspecialty and the care of children. So, in short, I love being part of such a (relatively) small, tight knit community of professionals working with the same overall mission in mind.