Meet SIDP’s President Elect: Lisa Dumkow, PharmD, FIDP, BCIDP

With the IDWeek conference this week, the public had a chance to be officially introduced to the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists (SIDP) President-Elect Lisa Dumkow, PharmD, FIDP, BCIDP.

Dumkow has been an active member of SIDP and deeply involved in the organization. In terms of her background, she received her Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of Toledo College of Pharmacy in Toledo, OH and then completed both her PGY1 and PGY2 infectious diseases residency training at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, MI. In her over a decade-long career at Trinity Health Grand Rapids, Dumkow has created a diverse practice centered around a culture of antimicrobial stewardship in both inpatient and outpatient settings. She has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications and among her many awards is a past recipient of the Michigan Society of Health System-Pharmacists’ Best Practice Award, Fellowship in SIDP award winner and SIDP Distinguished Service Award recipient. She is succeeding Erin K. McCreary, PharmD, BCIDP, FIDSA, in the position. Dumkow will begin her tenure on June 1, 2026.

For the uninitiated, the SIDP is a professional society of just over 2000 members, practicing in infectious diseases, pharmacotherapy. Their mission is to advance infectious diseases pharmacy and lead antimicrobial stewardship in order to optimize the care of patients.

In terms of Dumkow’s goals one of the key ones is to increase membership.

“I want to make sure that we're sustaining the growth of the society. We've grown our membership exponentially the last few years, especially this past year, and a lot of that is due to our really dedicated volunteers, our membership committee and really looking to expand our membership opportunities to some society members that we maybe haven't reached out to before, including our trainees, some of our international folks, those practicing in HIV pharmacotherapy. We want to make sure that we continue to be the home for all pharmacists who are practicing in every facet of infectious disease, recognizing that, yes, we have a lot of pharmacists practicing in stewardship and ID consultation,” Dumkow said.

And in terms of clinical education, Dumkow points to SIDP’s successful podcast, Breakpoints. They did their first Breakpoints in Spanish recently and she said it was well received. “We had over 3500 listens in just 3 days to that podcast; with the Spanish episode actually having more listens than the English episode at that point,” she said. “Even now, looking at the metrics, the Spanish episode is still has more listens than the English episode, and we're over 5000 listens now just a couple of weeks out.”

Dumkow acknowledges the state of public health today and the challenges associated with it. “Things are, I would say, influx right now, in terms of everything happening in the world, and in medicine. I think we're trying to be very dynamic about that as a society right now,” she said.

And in thinking about the role that professional societies play in public health and vaccines specifically, Dumkow says SIDP has been actively involved in this area.

"We want to be that source of truth for our members, for our patients, and make sure that we're putting the right information out to protect public health,” she said. “And we've been doing that with some vaccine advocacy already. We've got a couple of dedicated members appointed to different vaccine advocacy groups on the CIDRAP vaccine integrity project. We have a pharmacist member from SIDP who's specifically serving on that, and then 2 members who are appointed to ASHP's vaccine advocacy group who are actively working towards that as well. And we've been sending out—because of these members—up-to-date updates to our membership and passing that on to our patients.”