Matthew Baldwin, MD, MS

Herbert Irving Assistant Professor of Medicine at CUIMC

Matthew Baldwin, MD, MS, is studying frailty and palliative care needs in older adult survivors of acute respiratory failure, with funding from an Irving Scholar Award and additional funding from a K23 award from the National Institute on Aging. Using acute respiratory failure as a model of accelerated aging, his goal is to apply the geriatric construct of frailty to elucidate the common mechanisms governing aging that might underlie the pathology of physical impairments following critical illness due to acute respiratory failure.

Becoming an Irving Scholar was just one way that Dr. Baldwin's career has benefited from Irving Institute programs and services. He also obtained a Master of Science in Patient-Oriented Research and received a KL2 Mentored Career Development Award from the institute, which led to his current K23 funding. He has taken advantage of many of the services offered by the Irving Institute to help his research, including the Biomarkers Core Laboratory and Biomedical Informatics Consultations.

With the results of his current studies, he is working on an R01 that takes a precision gerontology approach to personalizing care for critical illness survivors by identifying post-ICU frailty endophenotypes using a combination of clinical geriatrics measurements, biomarker analyses, and omics analyses.

Dr. Baldwin sees the Irving Institute as crucial to fostering the careers of young investigators at Columbia. "As the expectations of training, prior experience, and productivity rise for early-stage investigators seeking their first major NIH grant, the traditional dyadic mentorship model becomes insufficient," he says. "The Irving Institute’s resources integrate with and complement the primary mentorship that a postdoctoral fellow or early stage career faculty member receives to create a network of mentorship and support that is the modern-day formula for success in training young clinician-scientists to become leaders in their respective medical fields."