2010 Award Recipients
Robert G. Narins Award
Barry M. Brenner, MD
Barry M. Brenner, MD, will receive the Robert G. Narins Award on Friday, November 19. Dr. Brenner is director emeritus of the renal division of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Samuel A. Levine Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. The award honors those who have made substantial contributions to education and teaching.
Dr. Brenner earned his MD degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1962 and completed his internal medicine residency at the Bronx Municipal Hospital Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in 1966. He continued his career in research positions at the National Heart Institute and the University of California, San Francisco, before arriving at Harvard in 1976. He has held various positions at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, including director of the laboratory of kidney and electrolyte physiology. During the period from 1979 to 2001, when he was director, Brigham's renal division was named America's leading nephrology program by U.S. News and World Report, a ranking that continues to the present day.
His basic and clinical research has focused on mechanisms of glomerular function in health and disease, for which he is generally considered the world's leading authority.
A former president of ASN, Dr. Brenner has served as an officer in many societies, including as councilor and vice president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, founding member and president of the American Society of Hypertension, councilor of the International Society of Nephrology, councilor of the American Association of Physicians, and chair of the section on medical sciences of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He has held 25 editorial board appointments, published more than 650 scientific articles, edited 48 books, and participated in more than 300 visiting lectures and/or professorships. He has received numerous awards and accolades, including Fellow, Royal College of Physicians in London; the Jean Hamburger Award and Amgen Prize of the International Society of Nephrology; the Richard Bright Award of the American Society of Hypertension; the Donald W. Selden and David M. Hume Awards of the National Kidney Foundation; and the Novartis International Award of the American Heart Association. He is the only person to have received both the ASN's Homer W. Smith Award for basic science and John P. Peters Award for clinical science. He has also received honorary degrees from Harvard University, Long Island University, Université de Paris, and Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Belding H. Scribner Award
Hans-Henrik Parving, MD
The Belding H. Scribner Award will go to Hans-Henrik Parving, MD, DMSc, at the plenary session on Saturday, November 20.
Established in 1995, the Scribner Award is presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the care of patients with renal disorders or have substantially changed the clinical practice of nephrology.
Dr. Parving is professor and chief physician in the department of endocrinology at the National Hospital and University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He was chief physician at the Steno Diabetes Center from 1983 to 2006 and is professor of diabetic vascular complications at the University of Aarhus.
Dr. Parving has published more than 410 peer-reviewed papers as well as 80 reviews and textbook chapters. For 35 years, his research has focused on studies on diabetic micro- and macroangiopathy. He undertook large observational studies to track the natural history of diabetic micro- and macroangiopathy, and demonstrated the existence of impaired autoregulation of blood flow in many organs and tissues. His research documented the life-saving importance of early intensive antihypertensive treatment in diabetic nephropathy and the significance of microalbuminuria as a risk marker for development of diabetic kidney disease.
He led several prospective studies that evaluated the genetic and nongenetic risk factors in the initiation and progression of diabetic nephropathy. The researchers' randomized prospective studies evaluated the prevention and treatment of diabetic nephropathy in type 1 patients using angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) and non-ACE inhibitors and demonstrated that intensified multifactorial intervention delays the progression of vascular complications in high-risk patients with Type 2 diabetes mellitus and microalbuminuria. Recently, his team documented the renoprotective effects of dual blockade of the renin-angiotensin system and of ultrahigh doses of angiotensin II receptor antagonists, aldosterone blockade, and direct renin inhibition in diabetic nephropathy.
Dr. Parving has served as chair or a member of several national and international boards of scientific societies and councils. He is active in multinational treatment investigations concerning prevention and treatment of renal and cardiovascular disease, including molecular genetics of diabetic nephropathy.
He has received several national and international awards, including the Castelli Pedroli Prize of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, the Novartis Award in Diabetes, the COZAAR Investigator Award for Renal Dysfunction, the American National Kidney Foundation's International Distinguished Medal, the H.C. Hagedorn Prize, the Viswanathan Gold Medal Award, the European Union's Europe et Medicine Award, and the Outstanding Foreign Investigator Award of the Japanese Society of Diabetic Complications.
John P. Peters Award
Roland C. Blantz, MD, FASN
The American Society of Nephrology will present its John P. Peters Award to Roland C. Blantz, MD, FASN, at Thursday's plenary session. Established in 1983, the Peters Award honors individuals who have made substantial research contributions to the discipline of nephrology with achievements in one or more areas of academic medicine, including clinical care, education, and leadership.
Dr. Blantz is professor of medicine and head of the division of nephrology-hypertension at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Previously, he was chief of the nephrology section at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Diego.
A leader in the field, he has served as president of the ASN, chair of the American Kidney Societies, chair of ASN's Chronic Kidney Disease Advisory Group, and chair of the External Advisory Committee of the National Institutes of Health HEMO trial. He has served as chair of the UCSD School of Medicine faculty. He recently won the William Middleton Award for Excellence in Research from the Veterans Administration Research Service.
Dr. Blantz's research has produced many peer-reviewed publications on the role of angiotensin in the regulation of blood pressure and kidney hemodynamics. He has made longstanding contributions to the understanding of the intrarenal tubuloglomerular feedback system and its capacity to temporally adapt to circumstances such as volume status, sodium chloride intake, variations in proximal tubular reabsorption, and loss of nephron mass. His research team has also examined kidney abnormalities in models such as acute kidney injury, glomerular immune injury, chronic kidney disease, and the early diabetic kidney. They have proposed novel mechanisms leading to glomerular hyperfiltration and paradoxical responses to sodium intake in the diabetic kidney. Recent studies have examined the role of variations in metabolism and oxygen consumption in the normal kidney compared with a chronic kidney disease model.
Dr. Blantz received his degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and completed his research fellowship in the renal division of the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas.
Homer W. Smith Award
Wilhelm Kriz, MD
An honor that recognizes outstanding contributions to understanding how kidneys function in normal and diseased states, the Homer W. Smith Award will be presented to Wilhelm Kriz, MD, on Friday, November 19.
Dr. Kriz is professor emeritus of anatomy on the Medical Faculty Mannheim of the University of Heidelberg in Mannheim, Germany. He is acting chairman of the newly founded department of anatomy there. He served as full professor and chairman of the department of anatomy and cell biology at the University of Heidelberg for more than 30 years. Prior to that, he was associate professor in the department of anatomy at the University of Munster.
Born in what is now the Czech Republic, he received his medical degree from the University of Giessen, where he also completed a research fellowship in the department of anatomy.
Among his many medical and societal activities, he was dean of the medical faculty at Heidelberg, a member of the board of examiners responsible for the general examination in medicine in Germany for more than 20 years, and a member of the governing board of the University of Heidelberg for more than a decade.
Dr. Kriz made major contributions to our knowledge of renal function, with his main research interests including the structural organization of the mammalian kidney; structure-function correlations in the renal glomerulus, the juxtaglomerular apparatus, the distal tubule, and the thin limbs of Henle's loop; and the pathology of progressive renal disease.
He has received many awards over the years, including the Jakob Henle Medal from the University of Gottingen in 1990, the Bernd Tersteegen Award from the German Dialysis Society in 1998, and the Franz Volhard Medal from the Gesellschaft fur Nephrologie in 2007. In addition to ASN, he is a member of the Anatomische Gesellschaft, Nephrologische Gesellschaft, the International Society of Nephrology, and the Renal Pathology Society.
Donald W. Seldin Young Investigator Award
Nicholas Katsanis, PhD
The Young Investigator Award will be presented to Nicholas Katsanis, PhD, who has performed groundbreaking research on Bardet-Biedl syndrome, a rare genetic disorder with symptoms that include renal failure, obesity, and blindness.
Dr. Katsanis is the Brumley Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics, professor of cell biology, and director of the Center for Human Disease Modeling at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
His laboratory is attempting to identify the causative genes of Bardet-Biedl syndrome. To elucidate why the syndrome results in severe symptoms in some patients and only mild symptoms in others, his lab is developing animal models to understand how an individual's genome can influence the clinical presentation of this and other genetic diseases. His group is credited with early work showing that monogenic disorders are much more complicated than was previously believed. Bardet-Biedl syndrome is now a model for oligogenic disease, a category between classical monogenic and complex traits.
In addition, his laboratory is pursuing questions centered on the signaling roles of vertebrate cilia, the role of signaling pathway defects in the causality of ciliary disorders, and the dissection of second-site modification phenomena as a consequence of genetic load in a functional system.
Dr. Katsanis earned his doctorate at the University of London in 1997 and completed his postdoctoral work at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he first worked on the genetics of Down syndrome and then initiated his studies on the genetic and molecular basis of Bardet-Biedl syndrome. He worked for seven years at the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, with appointments in the departments of ophthalmology, molecular biology, and genetics. He joined the faculty of Duke in 2009.