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W. Michael “Mike” Scheld, MD, Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Virginia and Past President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), passed away on 21 April 2024, at the age of 76 years. Mike was an accomplished clinician, scholar, leader, and educator, a true renaissance person, who made seminal contributions to the field of infectious diseases.

Mike received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1969, followed by his medical degree from Cornell University Medical College, now Weill Cornell Medical College, in 1973 where he was elected into Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society and was the recipient of the “Good Physician Award” from the graduating class, the latter award given to the graduating physician for best exemplifying the qualities of a good physician as recognized by their classmates. It was during his time in medical school that Mike took a course in parasitology and began to think about a career studying and treating infectious diseases. But it was after a fourth-year elective in infectious disease at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where his attending physician was Donald Armstrong, that he decided that this was what he wanted to do. He went to the University of Virginia, because of its strength in infectious diseases, where he did his internal medicine residency under Edward Hook, followed by his infectious disease fellowship under Gerald Mandell. Mike's major mentor during his fellowship was Merle Sande and, with Merle and others, he began his work researching bacterial pathogenesis, first related to infective endocarditis and later to bacterial meningitis. Utilizing the rabbit model, his work not only defined important concepts in the pathogenesis and pathophysiology of bacterial meningitis, particularly the nature of blood-brain barrier alterations and subarachnoid space inflammation in contributing to outcome in this disorder and supporting the use of adjunctive dexamethasone for the management of bacterial meningitis, but he also evaluated antibiotic approaches to management that continue to have implications for the care of patients. Later in his career, his research was focused on septic shock, investigating how organisms produce death in the host and the influence of anti-inflammatory strategies. He authored or coauthored numerous peer-reviewed publications, review articles, and book chapters, was a coauthor on three IDSA guidelines panels for the management of bacterial meningitis, encephalitis, and health care-associated ventriculitis and meningitis, and was coeditor, along with Richard Whitley and Christina Marra, of the gold standard textbook Infections of the Central Nervous System, currently in its fourth edition.

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