Faculty Spotlight: UVA Doctor Conquers Disease by Day, Runs 100 Miles by Night
Above the row of 10 thick, hardcover books on infectious disease inside Dr. Costi Sifri’s office at the University of Virginia Medical Center is a shelf adorned with six coffee mugs, two belt buckles and half the top of a whiskey barrel.
Displaying tokens at work from your favorite hobby isn’t unusual. Sifri, an infectious disease specialist, is like the weekend golfer who shows off a hole-in-one ball on the desk or the amateur artist who pins an acrylic painting to the side of a cubicle.
Here’s a potential difference, though, between Sifri’s hobby and yours: Of those six mugs, four are for participating in 50-kilometer (31 miles) foot races. The belt buckles were rewards for finishing the Arkansas Traveler and Rim Runner 100-mile trail races. The whiskey barrel was a reward for finishing last in the Rim Runner.
“Do people think I’m crazy?” Sifri asked, repeating a reporter’s question. “Among most people who are non-runners, yeah. Even bona fide marathon runners will say, ‘100 miles, that’s crazy!’”
Sifri is UVA Health’s director of hospital epidemiology as well as the medical director of the immunocompromised infectious disease program at UVA and a professor in the School of Medicine. He’s helped lead institutional responses to high-consequence emerging microbial pathogens such as Ebola virus and COVID-19.
Original source can be found here
