Over the past 36 years, my outpatient focus has been the care and management of patients with complex glomerular and autoimmune diseases. I serve as attending physician on the renal consult services for UBMD Nephrology at Erie County Medical Center (ECMC) and Roswell Park Cancer Institute. I also serve as attending physician on the inpatient general medicine services at ECMC.

My research concentrates on understanding mechanisms that underlie kidney disease, including the role of the complement system, a major factor in the body‘s immune response. My lab has developed and studied animal models of systemic lupus erythematosus, diabetic nephropathy, glomerulonephritis, obstructive nephropathy and acute renal failure. In addition to modeling disease in animals, we also have performed clinical studies both for promising new therapies and for those that focus on examining gene profiles from diseased renal tissue. To answer questions that arise in the course of our research, our work spans a number of disciplines and utilizes state-of-the-art approaches such as mouse kidney transplantation, 15-color flow cytometry and magnetic resonance imaging.

My original degree is in mathematics, which remains a passion of mine. I also am interested in computational biology and founded the Computation Biology Core Facility at the University of Chicago. The core strength and emphasis of UB in the area of clinical informatics was a key factor in my decision to accept a position here so that I can continue to contribute to projects related to this field. In collaboration with leadership from other disciplines at UB, I helped establish one of the first clinical informatics fellowship programs in the United States. As a result, we accepted in 2014 the first joint nephrology/clinical informatics trainee in the country.

As an educator, I am committed to the career development of the students, trainees and faculty working with me in my lab, in clinical research areas, in clinical informatics and in the clinical arena. Over the course of my career, I have mentored many outstanding students, fellows and faculty. Under my leadership and guidance, a number have received nationally competitive awards, and many have gone on to become academic leaders--including one who became a medical school dean.

From 2004 to 2019, I served on the Kidney, Urologic and Hematologic Diseases Subcommittee of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), which critically evaluates training in nephrology.

From 2019 to the present (2024), I have been the chair of the NIH/NIDDK peer review committees of their programs in Glomerular Disease Research and Treatment (CureGN), Pediatric Centers of Excellence in Nephrology (P50), and Institutional Network Awards for Promoting Kidney, Urologic, and Hematologic Research Training (U2C-TL1).

Autoimmunity, Bioinformatics, Genomics and proteomics, Immunology, Internal Medicine, Molecular Basis of Disease, Nephrology

Adults, Seniors/Elderly

Physician Gender:

Male