The 2nd Acute Kidney Injury Conference: From Bench to Bedside

Mark De Caestecker is a physician-scientist and Professor in the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. His research focuses on the development and testing of novel therapeutics to enhance the regenerative capacity of kidneys after injury (using a Zebrafish screen and mouse models of injury), as well as the analysis of retinoic acid signaling and macrophage function after AKI. He and his research team have been continuously funded since 2002 and have three federally funded research programs: To study inflammation in acute kidney injury (AKI); To understand new therapeutic approaches to prevent chronic kidney disease progression after AKI; To develop an imaging platform to generate 3D molecular atlases of the human kidney (part of the HuBMAP consortium). 

Dr. De Caestecker earned his MB, BS from Middlesex Hospital, London, and his medical diploma in Internal Medicine from the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom (MRCP(UK)). He received his PhD from Manchester University, followed by his postdoctoral training under the supervision of Anita Roberts in the Laboratory of Cell Regulation and Carcinogenesis at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

At Vanderbilt University, Dr. De Caestecker is also the Director of the Vanderbilt Program in Molecular Medicine, a clinical enrichment program for basic science PhD students. He is Director of the Education and Outreach Program for the Vanderbilt Center for Kidney Disease, Director of the Vanderbilt Mouse Kidney Injury Workshop, and past Director of the Summer Research Training Program in Kidney Disease. He is Vice Chair for Faculty Development in the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and Director of the Neilson Society, the department’s career development program for all junior faculty on the tenure track. 

Dr. De Caestecker developed the concept and implemented the first FASEB Acute Kidney Injury bench to bedside conference in 2019. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Nephrology, a member of the American Physiological Society, and serves on the Editorial Board of American Journal of Physiology.

Stuart Leonard Goldstein is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine and the Director of the Center for Acute Care Nephrology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. His main research foci include AKI epidemiology and outcomes, acute renal replacement therapy provision, and the investigation of novel urinary AKI biomarkers in the pediatric population. 

Dr. Goldstein completed his MD from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons followed by a Pediatric Nephrology Fellowship at Boston Children's Hospital. His value for interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration can be evidenced by the successful Prospective Pediatric Continuous Renal Replacement Therapy (ppCRRT) Registry, which he established and directed, and his many collaborations with critical care physicians, cardiologists, and emergency medicine physicians to study AKI in their populations. 

In 2012, Goldstein established the ppAKI-RG (Prospective Pediatric AKI Research Group), an international research consortium with a mission to advance the translational science for children with AKI. The ppAKI-RG published an unprecedented prospective observational study, Assessment of Worldwide AKI, Renal Angina and Epidemiology in critically ill children (AWARE – NCT01987921). AWARE enrolled 5,927 patients from 32 centers worldwide, making it the largest pediatric critical care nephrology study executed to date. 

Dr. Goldstein is a Member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Society of Nephrology, International Pediatric Nephrology Association, and American Society of Pediatric Nephrology.
 

Kelly Anne Hyndman is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology, Cardio-Renal Physiology and Medicine. Her research has focused on the evolution of gene families necessary for maintaining fluid-electrolyte balance (e.g., the autocrine/paracrine molecule endothelin), to determining cellular mechanisms necessary to maintain fluid-electrolyte homeostasis. 

The overarching theme of her research program is determining the mechanisms of acetyltransferase, deacetylase, and lysine acetylation in both physiological and pathological states. Her lab currently has two focused areas of research: 1) Understanding the physiology and regulatory mechanisms of lysine acetylation in the kidney, and how enzymes in these pathways are critical to maintain fluid-electrolyte balance. 2) Understanding the pathophysiology of epigenetic regulating pathways in acute kidney injury and chronic kidney disease progression. 

Hyndman earned her undergraduate degree in Marine and Freshwater Biology from the University of Guelph. She completed her PhD in Zoology at the University Florida, followed by a postdoc at the Vascular Biology Center and Section of Experimental Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia.

Hyndman is a member of the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Salisbury Cove, Maine, where she is an Instructor for the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Comparative Physiology Course. She is an appointed Special Government Employee to the Nephrology Subcommittee Study Section of the Joint Biomedical Laboratory Research and Development and Clinical Science Research and Development Services Scientific Merit Review Board for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. 

Hyndman is an Editorial Fellow with the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, and is an Editorial Board Member for Hypertension, the American Journal of Physiology–Renal Physiology, and the American Journal of Physiology–Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology. 

She is the recipient of the New Investigator Award, Renal Section (2020) and the Renal Research Recognition Award (2017) from the American Physiology Society. At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Hyndman is a Pittman Scholar in the School of Medicine (2018 – 2022) and was named the 2020 Unsung Hero in Nephrology.