Anupam Agarwal, M.D.Anupam Agarwal, M.D., will become the next president of the American Society of Nephrology on Jan. 1, 2020, for a one-year term. The organization is made up of more than 20,000 health professionals from 131 countries.
Agarwal is the director of the Division of Nephrology and the executive vice dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is also the program director of the O’Brien Center for Acute Kidney Injury Research, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health.
“I am honored to be ASN’s incoming president,” Agarwal said. “There has never been a more important and exciting time for nephrology. We are seeing changes we’ve never seen before, including increased awareness by our government of the importance of kidney health. ASN has been at the vanguard of all these developments, so it is a privilege to be taking on this role.”
He previously served as a member of ASN’s Program Committee and Grants Review Committee and as deputy editor of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
Agarwal’s accomplishments span the areas of clinical medicine, research, administration and teaching. His bibliography includes 40 invited reviews or book chapters and 155 peer-reviewed papers in journals such as the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, Journal of Clinical Investigation, JCI Insight, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Circulation, Circulation Research, the Journal of Experimental Medicine, the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the American Journal of Pathology.
His research, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs, focuses on acute kidney injury and the progression of kidney disease. His work has elucidated the nature and significance of heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) in vascular and renal inflammation, and injury, and the molecular regulation of the human HO-1 gene. For this work, he is a recipient of the Max Cooper Award for Excellence in Research, the Thomas Andreoli Professorship in Nephrology, the Marie S. Ingalls Endowed Chair in Nephrology Leadership, a Dean’s Excellence Award for Leadership, the Graduate Dean’s Excellence in Mentorship Award at UAB, and election to membership in the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the American Clinical and Climatological Association, and the Association of American Physicians (AAP).
Agarwal also regularly teaches medical students, internal medicine house staff and nephrology fellows.