Dr. Samih H. Nasr. After graduating from Damascus University (Syria), Dr. Nasrcompleted his pathology residency and nephropathology fellowship at Columbia University, New York.  He then served on the faculty at McGill University and Columbia University. He has published over 165 manuscripts, focusing on paraprotein-related kidney diseases and glomerular diseases with organized deposits, including amyloidosis and fibrillary glomerulonephritis.

Dr. Jeffrey B. Hodgin received his PhD from the laboratory of Drs. Oliver Smithies and Nobuyo Maeda in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Pathology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 2001, and his MD, also from UNC, in 2003. Dr. Hodgin completed residency training in Anatomic Pathology at Columbia University, New York, in 2006 and a Nephropathology Fellowship at Columbia University under the tutelage of Dr. Vivette D’Agati in 2008. As a fellow, he investigated genome-wide expression profiling of laser-captured glomeruli from renal biopsies of FSGS patients found in the extensive archives at Columbia.  His experience there solidified a desire to focus his research and clinical career on diseases of the kidney, specifically glomerular diseases. Since joining the Department of Pathology at the University of Michigan in July of 2008, and working with Dr. Matthias Kretzler in Nephrology, Dr. Hodgin has added a systems biology approach to his interests and expertise. Since the inception of the Nephrotic Syndrome Study Network (NEPTUNE) over 10 years ago, he has been a member of the NEPTUNE Pathology Group and helped implement a standardized pathology scoring system to study structural-molecular-functional interactions for proteinuric glomerular diseases such as FSGS. More recently has joined the Kidney Precision Medicine Project (KPMP) as both Principle Investigator for a Tissue Interrogation Site, tasked with single cell RNA sequencing of human kidney biopsies, and as a Co-Investigator for the Central Hub as one of the kidney pathologists on the team working to create the KPMP Kidney Atlas. He now has more than 50 publications in both basic and translational research areas and has been funded though NIH and foundation grants as well as pharmaceutical agencies.

Dr. John Tomaszewski is professor and chair of the Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences. Internationally renowned for his scholarship, teaching and service, Dr. Tomaszewski is a leader in clinical and digital pathology, computational modeling in histopathology, and the informatics revolution in pathology, where he contributes to international diagnostic guidelines. He is widely praised by his colleagues for his innovative approach to applying engineering and quantitative techniques to biopsy visualization and analysis for cancer and kidney disaese. Dr. Tomaszewski holds four patents and has published more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and 35 book chapters, including 10 chapters dealing with his special interests in renal pathology, renal transplant and immunopathology. Among his numerous leadership roles, Dr. Tomaszewski served as president of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists (ASCP), the world’s largest organization for pathologists and laboratory professionals. In recognition of his exceptional leadership and research contributions, he was awarded Mastership by ASCP in 2014, the organization’s highest honor.

Dr. Pinaki Sarder is currently an assistant professor of pathology and anatomical sciences at University at Buffalo, with adjunct appointments in biomedical engineering and biostatistics. Earlier he was a post-doctoral research associate at Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 2003, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, in 2010. Dr. Sarder serves as an academic editor of Plos One, and is a senior member of IEEE. He is a recipient of University at Buffalo’s Exceptional Scholars – Young Investigator Award in 2018. His current research interests include computational image analysis and digital pathology with applications to renal pathology informatics. He has published 45 peer reviewed articles in journals and conference proceedings. His notable works as the senior author include a human-artificial-intelligence-loop approach for segmenting pathological structures from whole slide thin tissue images, which he published in Nature Machine Intelligence, and an automated computational version of tervaert classification scheme for classifying renal biopsy cases of diabetic nephropathy, which has been recently accepted for publication in Journal of American Society of Nephrology

Dr. Scott Doyle received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University in 2011, after which he worked for a start-up company on an NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to commercialize his research. Following his work in industry, he is now an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, and Biomedical Informatics at the University at Buffalo. His research work is on using artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand biology and disease, with a focus on computational pathology and cancer. By using computer vision and machine learning, his models can accurately predict the presence, severity, and likely outcome of disease using features that are similar to those used in clinical and surgical pathology. His projects include
work in oral cavity, colon, and thyroid cancers, with data collected through several national healthcare providers. His lab consists of students at all academic levels drawn from both biological and engineering backgrounds, and a major focus of his teaching and mentoring involves translation of complex concepts to a more general audience.

Prof. Thorsten Wiech graduated at Hamburg University, Germany and then completed the pathologist residency in Freiburg and nephropathology fellowships in Basel, Switzerland. In 2012 he became professor for renal pathology in Hamburg. His research focus is ANCA associated glomerulonephritis and complement in glomerular diseases.

Dr. Benjamin A. Adam completed medical school and residency training in Anatomical Pathology at the University of Alberta, followed by subspecialty training in Renal Pathology at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital, Thoracic Pathology at Toronto General Hospital, and Transplantation Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. His research is focused on molecular renal and transplantation pathology, including the use of cutting-edge gene expression technologies to better diagnose and predict outcomes in various pre- and post-transplant diseases. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop more precise tools to facilitate the delivery of personalized medicine. He has authored over 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and traveled throughout the world to present and lecture on the topics of his research.

Dr. Shreeram Akilesh completed a B.A. in Biochemistry from Dartmouth College and obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. He has made seminal contributions to the understanding of protein clearance at the glomerular filtration barrier, the genetic basis of FSGS and the cell biological mechanisms of podocyte foot process effacement. Dr. Akilesh is a Renal Pathologist at the University of Washington (Seattle, USA) and his laboratory uses cutting-edge epigenomics methods to study kidney disease.