Umubo Village.Baltimore.Everything between.

Umubo is not on most maps. It is where David first learned that a hospital is a place you travel to, and that the journey decides a great deal. Childhood and early schooling, in his own words

The road out ran through Massachusetts. In 2012 he published a letter on how automated ECG readings should be validated, written with L. Lee Glenn, a mentor. His work with incarcerated people in Boston was recognized by President Bill Clinton through the Clinton Global Initiative University. And in 2018, at Tufts Medical Center, he was first author of the Massachusetts statewide Inpatient Opioid Misuse Prevention Guidelines. Issued through the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association, the guidelines covered screening for opioid use disorder, preventing withdrawal, responding to overdose and keeping opioids out of the hospital. A 2022 review in the Journal of Addiction Medicine cites them among the policies shaping hospital addiction care.

Care here funds care everywhere.

Surgery came next. He is a general surgery chief resident at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Between clinical years he was lead postdoctoral researcher on Dr. Jennifer S. Lawton's NIH-funded search for ways to protect the brain during cardiac surgery. That work, much of it at Johns Hopkins, helped show that a portable, ultra-low-field MRI can image the brain of a patient on ECMO safely at the bedside, without the dangerous trip to a scanner. It has appeared in Circulation, Critical Care Medicine and the ASAIO Journal.

The institutions came from the same question. He founded AthleticsMD and leads it as Founding President. He is founding chairman of Healing Vessels International, the family's 501(c)(3), and of its teaching arm, Global Surgery University. He designed that university's five-year integrated surgical pathway, from foundational sciences to supervised independent practice through four gates, for a graduate who is still operating in the district hospital a decade later. He serves as a regional director within the Johns Hopkins Global Alliance of Perioperative Professionals. On Sundays he is a pastor.

The model behind all of it is his, and it is simple to say: the clinical work in Columbia and Laurel pays for surgical capacity in Liberia, The Gambia and Nigeria. Umubo never stopped being the point. Public service is how he intends to widen that circle.