Frederick Kofi Korley, MD, PhD

Frederick Korley, M.D., Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Michigan. He received his medical and emergency medicine education at Northwestern University School of Medicine, serving as chief resident during his final year of training. He also received doctoral training in clinical investigation at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health with election into Phi Beta Kappa. His doctoral thesis represents the first published study of the diagnostic accuracy of a high sensitivity troponin assay in a US emergency department population. He was the inaugural recipient of the Robert E. Meyerhoff Assistant Professorship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Korley’s research work is focused on the development of diagnostics and therapeutics for TBI. With regards to the development of diagnostics for TBI, Dr. Korley holds a patent for a panel of biofluid-based biomarkers for brain injury detection and outcome prognostication. He is a co-investigator of the largest observational study of TBI in the US (the Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in TBI, TRACK-TBI). As part of this work, he leads efforts in the clinical validation of novel brain injury biomarkers. In collaboration with colleagues in engineering, Dr. Korley is also developing a credit card sized microfluidic device for point-of-care measurement of TBI bioflud biomarkers. Dr. Korley is also a co-investigator in the clinical coordinating center of the NIH funded Strategies to Innovate Emergency Clinical Care Trials (SIREN) network. He is a principal investigator of two federally funded research studies run by the SIREN network, that are investigating the use of biofluid-based biomarkers for 1) subject selection in clinical trials; 2) monitoring individual patient response to promising neuroprotective agents. He also participates in the DoD/FDA funded TBI Endpoints Development (TED) Initiative, a public-private partnership examining effective measures or “endpoints” of brain injury and recovery. With regards to the development of therapeutics for TBI, Dr. Korley is a principal investigator of a SIREN network NINDS funded phase II adaptive design clinical trial that is investigating the optimal treatment parameters of hyperbaric oxygen that is most likely to demonstrate improvement in the rate of good neurological outcome versus control in a subsequent confirmatory trial. During the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Korley is leveraging his expertise in the testing of novel therapeutics to lead an NHLBI funded multi-center clinical trial of COVID-19 convalescent plasma in outpatients (C3PO) as one of the national co-PIs. With enrollment of participants at >50 emergency departments across the country, this study represents a significant contribution by the emergency medicine community to test a promising therapeutic in COVID-19 patients who are discharged home from the emergency department. Dr. Korley has >70 peer-reviewed publications in high impact journals such as JAMA, Lancet, JAMA Neurology, JAMA Psychiatry, JAMA Cardiology, and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. He is a member of the NINDS Neurological Sciences and Disorders A (NSD-A) study section.