Fergus is a Nephrologist, Consultant Senior Clinical Lecturer and Medical Director at the UK Renal Registry. Having graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1993, he went on to obtain a Masters in Public Health and Health Services Research and then a further Masters in the Cost-effectiveness of Dialysis in Europe from the University of Aberdeen. He has a special interest in health services research. Fergus became a Consultant Nephrologist in Bristol in 2005 and was appointed Medical Director of the UK Renal Registry in 2013. His research interests include the epidemiology of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and end stage renal disease (ESRD) particularly around equity, the application of mixed methods research to understand the reasons behind observed differences, and the measurement of patient reported outcomes. He is increasingly involved in randomized trials embedded in registries and routine healthcare data.
Professor Jonathan Craig is an internationally recognized clinician and scientist and holds the position of Vice President and Executive Dean of the College of Medicine & Public Health at Flinders University.
Professor Craig has made a significant contribution to the clinical research landscape in the prevention, identification, management and treatment of chronic kidney disease, particularly in relation to children and in Indigenous communities.
He has led the formation of state, national and international networks to conduct high-quality, relevant trials in children and has been instrumental to the development and implementation of best-practice methods and guidelines relating to chronic kidney disease in Australia and globally.
Professor Craig holds a large number of board and advisory panel positions, including as a member of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Advisory Group on the Synthesis and Translation of Research Evidence, a member of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, a member of the Medicare Services Advisory Committee, a member of the International Advisory Panel for Singapore’s Agency for Care Effectiveness, and President of the Australia-NZ Society of Nephrology.
He is a past member of the WHO expert review panel for global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property, a past chairman of the Steering Group of the Cochrane Collaboration, and a past member of the Expert Advisory Group for the Structural Review of NHMRC’s Grant Program.
President, PKD International
General Secretary, Ciliopathy Alliance
Tess Harris is CEO of the UK Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD) Charity, President of PKD International – the global alliance of PKD patient groups – and General Secretary of the Ciliopathy Alliance. Tess co-chairs the European ADPKD Forum, which recently published a ‘joint position statement’ on the principles of care of ADPKD patients in Europe. She is the international patient representative on the SONG (Standardised Outcomes in Nephrology) Executive Committee, and the International Advisory Board of Can-SOLVE CKD. She represents PKD patients on the Renal and Liver European Reference Networks. She chairs the UK ADPKD Clinical Study Group, the first and only patient representative in this role.
In 2014, Tess co-chaired the Patient/Carer group at the KDIGO ADPKD Consensus Conference. From 2013-15, she sat on the European Medicines Agency expert working group which, in 2015, published a qualification opinion supporting baseline total kidney volume (TKV), in combination with patient age and eGFR, as a prognostic biomarker for trial enrichment. She inherited ADPKD along with 3 siblings (one deceased) from her father (also deceased) and has other affected relatives: niece, nephew and great-nephews. Prior to her charity roles, Tess was an entrepreneur in cosmetics, defence, spectacles and online leadership learning. She is a former international chairman of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and latterly lectured in e-business. In her spare time, she designs websites and is an aspiring novelist and children’s book writer.
Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales
Meg Jardine is a clinician researcher developing a program of research exploring the cardiovascular and other complications of chronic kidney disease and diabetes. Dr. Jardine has worked as a Nephrologist in both the public and private sectors, where she directly manages chronic kidney disease and diabetes and their consequences for patients.
She is currently Deputy Director of the Renal & Metabolic Division at the George Institute for Global Health; Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, UNSW Sydney; and holds an NHMRC Career Development Fellowship. She has presented her work in Late Breaking and prize sessions of the World Congress of Nephrology and the Australasian Nephrology conference and has published in high impact journals. Dr. Jardine is collaborating on the development and delivery of other national and international trials investigating methods to mitigate the excess burden of cardiovascular disease and is Chair of the Australasian Kidney Trials Network Haemodialysis Working Group.
Hiddo Lambers Heerspink is affiliated with the Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacology of the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands. He received his PhD degree from the medical faculty of the University Medical Center Groningen in 2008. He then worked as a post-doctoral fellow at The George Institute in Sydney, Australia where he investigated the effects of blood pressure lowering regimens on renal and cardiovascular outcomes in patients with renal impairment. Based on this work, he was awarded a young investigator grant and subsequently in 2015 a consolidator investigator grant from the Dutch organisation of scientific research and in received in 2016 the Galien award for his research.
Since 2010, Doctor Lambers Heerspink has held a position as a Clinical Pharmacologist at the University Medical Center Groningen. He is currently Professor Clinical Trials and Personalized Medicine. His main research interests include optimising treatment strategies and finding new therapeutic approaches to halt the progression of renal and cardiovascular disease. His particular clinical research interest is to identify determinants of individual treatment responses and ways to optimize drug response in individual patients. To achieve these goals he is involved in various international clinical trials and uses biomarkers and imaging techniques to unravel pathways and determinants of therapy response.
Professor Liz Lightstone completed her undergraduate medical training at Cambridge University for preclinical studies (first class degree), followed by clinical studies at King’s College Hospital, London. She was runner up to Gold Medallist in the University of London (UCL) final MBBS with honours in four subjects. She completed her clinical training at London teaching hospitals and renal training initially at Guy’s Hospital as a senior house officer (SHO) and subsequently at Hammersmith Hospital as registrar and senior registrar. She undertook a PhD in immunology at the ICRF tumour immunology unit at UCL (PhD awarded 1993) funded by a Medical Research Council (MRC) Training Fellowship. This was followed by an MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship in the department of immunology at Hammersmith Hospital. Professor Lightstone was appointed senior lecturer in renal medicine and honorary consultant physician in 1995. She was appointed reader in 2011 and professor of renal medicine in 2014.
Constance B. Wofsy Distinguished Professor of Medicine, University of California San Francisco
Dr. Powe serves as leader of the University of California San Francisco Medicine Service at the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, a leading Medicine department in a public hospital with strong basic, clinical and health services research programs focused on major diseases affecting diverse patients locally, nationally and globally. His interests are in improving discovery, education and clinical practice in medicine, making academic organizations function better, enhancing scholarship and multidisciplinary collaboration, and developing future talent and leadership in the health professions. He has a particular interest in cultivating young scientists who are addressing major problems in science, health and health care delivery.
His primary intellectual pursuits involve kidney disease patient-oriented research, epidemiology and outcomes and effectiveness research. His research unites Medicine and Public Health with the goals of saving and improving quality of human lives. It involves the knowledge of fundamental discoveries in biology and clinical medicine to advance the health of patients and populations affected by kidney disease.
Dr. Powe earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School and his master’s in public health at Harvard School of Public Health. He completed residency, was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and completed his master’s in business administration at the University of Pennsylvania.
Associate Professor Allison Tong is a Principal Research Fellow at the Sydney School of Public Health, The University of Sydney. She holds an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Career Development Fellowship. She is a social scientist with experience in using applied qualitative research methods to the area of chronic disease; to inform practice and policy for improved patient-centred outcomes. Allison has a particular interest and experience in patient involvement in the context of research priority setting and the development of core outcomes for research. She co-founded and is on the Executive Committee of the global Standardised Outcomes in Nephrology (SONG) Initiative, which aims to establish consensus-based core outcomes across the spectrum of chronic kidney disease (www.songinitiative.org). She established the Patient-Centred Research Network (PACER, www.pacernetwork.org.au) network, which aims to facilitate knowledge exchange, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and innovation in conducting and implementing patient-centred outcomes research and patient involvement in research.
Allison developed the consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative health research (COREQ), and the enhancing transparency in reporting the synthesis of qualitative health research [ENTREQ]; which are both endorsed as key reporting guidelines by leading journals and by the international EQUATOR Network for promoting the transparency of health research. She has taught qualitative health research methods internationally for government and university institutions including Stanford University, Mayo Clinic, University of Colorado, and The University of Calgary.
Katherine R. Tuttle, MD, FASN, FACP, FNKF, is the Executive Director for Research at Providence Health Care and the regional Principal Investigator for the Institute of Translational Health Sciences, established Investigator at the Kidney Research Institute, and clinical Professor of Medicine in the Nephrology Division at the University of Washington. Dr. Tuttle earned her medical degree and completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. She was a fellow in Metabolism and Endocrinology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Her Nephrology fellowship training was performed at University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, Texas.
Dr. Tuttle’s major research interests are in the areas of clinical and translational science and precision medicine strategies to tackle diabetic kidney disease, chronic kidney disease, diabetes, and hypertension. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Kidney Health Initiative and was Associate Editor of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology in the years 2011 through 2016. She has received numerous honors and awards including the Garabed Eknoyan Award from the National Kidney Foundation (2017), the YWCA Woman of Achievement Award in Science (2009), and two Outstanding Clinical Faculty Awards at the University of Washington (1992, 2012).
Dr. Tuttle has been chair of regional, national, and international organizational programs, including: Institutional Review Board – Spokane (1999-2012), National Kidney Foundation – Kidney Disease Outcomes Quality Initiative for Diabetes and Chronic Kidney Disease (20042012), National Diabetes Education Program (2006-2011), Diabetes and Chronic Kidney Disease Consensus Conference of the American Diabetes Association (2014), National Kidney Foundation Young Investigator Awards (2014), International Society of Nephrology – World Congress of Nephrology (2017), Kidney Health Initiative annual meeting (2017-2018).
NHMRC Career Development Fellow, University of Sydney
Germaine Wong is an academic transplant nephrologist at Westmead Hospital, in Sydney. She is also a NHMRC Career Development Fellow at the University of Sydney. Her main areas of interest are cancer epidemiology, diagnostic test evaluations, decision and simulation modelling, and other important aspects of outcomes research in nephrology and transplantation such as utility-based quality of life measures, transplantation outcomes in young adults, cancer and cardiovascular disease after transplantation; and areas in organ donation, wait-listing and organ allocation. She has expertise in diagnostic test evaluation methodologies, biostatistics, simulation modelling, and has examined topics including the cost-effectiveness of cancer screening and other pharmaceutical interventions in patients on dialysis and with kidney transplants. Through the support of the Jacquot Research Establishment and the Don and Lorraine Jacquot Fellowship, she has established, led and co-ordinated a number of large scale population-based observational studies that assessed the impact of social determinants and outcomes in people with chronic kidney disease and kidney transplants. Using big data, Germaine has provided novel based evidence on the health determinants and outcomes associated with chronic kidney disease. She has developed a team of research excellence that focuses largely on improving the health outcomes of transplantation, integrating transplant epidemiology with biostatistics, bioinformatics, health economics, health services and implementation research that aims to provide a comprehensive evidentiary base for preventive, monitoring and treatment strategies to reduce the burden of co-morbidities after transplantation.
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