Dr. Paddy Ssentongo is a physician–scientist whose work integrates infectious diseases, neuroscience, and data science to understand how infections injure the brain. He has developed murine models of cerebral malaria and Paenibacillus thiaminolyticus meningitis to define infection-driven neuroinflammation, neuronal injury, and neurovascular dysfunction using behavioral, histologic, and quantitative approaches.

At the population level, he analyzes large electronic health records, international cohorts, and geospatial and climate datasets to identify drivers of infection-related morbidity and mortality. His expertise includes real-world evidence generation, machine learning, spatiotemporal modeling, causal inference, and systematic reviews.

His emerging research focus centers on brain and metabolic aging in people with HIV, with plans to apply brain-age imaging, metabolomic aging signatures, and neurovascular biomarkers to detect early, modifiable signs of accelerated aging and cognitive decline.

Dr. Ssentongo’s multidisciplinary background and strong research record position him to lead an innovative program at the interface of neuroinfectious disease, aging, and precision medicine.

Dr. Paddy Ssentongo is board-certified in internal medicine and an infectious disease fellow who cares for a high volume of hospitalized adults with complex multisystem disease. His clinical interests include severe bacterial and fungal infections, HIV and aging, tick-borne infections such as babesiosis, post-operative and device-related infections, and infections in immunocompromised hosts. He is particularly interested in cases that sit at the interface of infectious diseases, neurology, and critical care, such as CNS infections, sepsis-related brain dysfunction, and post-infectious epilepsy.

He is also passionate about antimicrobial stewardship and the use of real-world data to optimize antibiotic selection, duration, and care pathways for conditions such as bacteremia, endocarditis, and osteomyelitis. Dr. Ssentongo’s global health background informs his approach to equity-focused care, including attention to social determinants of health, access to diagnostics and therapeutics, and the translation of lessons from low-resource settings to practice in high-resource hospitals. Across settings, his goal is to deliver precise, evidence-informed, and highly humanistic infectious diseases care.

Dr. Paddy Ssentongo is committed to training future physician–scientists and data-driven clinicians. His teaching centers on clinical epidemiology, infectious diseases, global health, and practical quantitative methods, including systematic reviews, causal reasoning, and data analysis in R. He has taught graduate-level epidemiology and delivered invited lectures on meta-analytic methods and infection-related research.

Mentorship is a core priority. He has supervised medical students, residents, and graduate trainees who have presented at national meetings and published in peer-reviewed journals. He focuses on creating clear, efficient, and reproducible research pathways that align with clinical training and help learners from diverse backgrounds build confidence and leadership in academic medicine.

Board certification in internal medicine, American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), 2025

Member, American Medical Association

Member, American College of Physicians

Member, Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA)

Member, IDSA - ID Informatics Interest Group