Steven A. Sumner, MD, MSc

Senior Advisor, Division of Violence Prevention

Areas of Expertise

• Violence prevention
• Firearm injury data
• Mental health and suicide
• Hospital and healthcare partnerships
• Real-time and large administrative data
• Data science and machine learning

Dr. Steven Sumner, MD, MSc, serves as a senior advisor in CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention where he provides strategic direction and guidance to both CDC staff and external partners implementing violence-related data collection, research, and prevention activities. His recent work has focused on the use of real-time data for firearm homicide, suicide, and overdose research.

Dr. Sumner previously served as Senior Advisor for Data Science and Innovation in CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, leading the center’s work in machine learning and natural language processing for injury prevention. He has published research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the British Medical Journal, among other leading scientific journals and has been awarded CDC’s Excellence in Quantitative Sciences Award, one of the agency’s highest honors in data and research methodology.

Dr. Sumner completed medical school at the Medical College of Wisconsin and an Internal Medicine residency at Duke University. Dr. Sumner also holds a Masters of Science degree from Duke University and has completed research fellowships with CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service and through the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center.