Congratulations to Guoshuai Cai, Ph.D., an assistant professor and director of the University of Florida Surgery Genomics Core, on being awarded the 2026 Excellence Award for Assistant Professors from the University of Florida!

Cai recently received a prestigious $2.1 million Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award from the National Institutes of Health to support his work studying long-term sepsis outcomes. His work involves decoding why patients who develop sepsis can leave the hospital on two very different paths: one recovering steadily and the other sliding into long-term weakness, repeat infections, rehospitalizations and other setbacks.

Cai’s two-pronged approach considers two important questions: why do patients with similar in-hospital health profiles have significantly different outcomes after sepsis, and is there a way to identify biologically distinct endotypes that respond to different treatments?

He describes his work as having two arms: one that generates data and one that examines it.

“The data we have is very rich,” Cai said. “Part of what we’re doing is building a pipeline between the clinical data and the teams of biostatisticians who collaborate with us to build analytical tools.”

The award is given to 10 assistant professors or assistant curators across the university each year, given to researchers whose work represents a high level of quality and impact. In addition to the recognition, recipients are also given a $5,000 stipend to support research-related expenditures.

Learn more about Dr. Cai’s important research.