Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin

Kai-Uwe Eckardt

Biographical Sketch

Kai-Uwe Eckardt is Professor of Medicine and Head of the Department of Nephrology and Medical Intensive Care at the Charité in Berlin, one of Europe´s largest university hospitals. Prior to taking this position in 2017, he was Chair of Nephrology and Hypertension at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, where he also served as Vice Dean for Research and International Affairs.

He studied medicine at the University of Münster, Germany, and the Welsh National School of Medicine, UK, and attained an MD in genetics in 1985. He completed residency and fellowship training in pathology, physiology, internal medicine, nephrology and critical care at the universities of Münster, Hannover, Zurich, Oxford and Berlin. He is board certified in physiology, internal medicine, nephrology, intensive care and emergency medicine.

Dr Eckardt´s major research interests lie in the molecular mechanisms and relevance of oxygen sensing, and the development of acute and chronic kidney injury. Early during his career, he identified peritubular fibroblasts as production sites of erythropoietin and studied mechanisms of oxygen-dependent production of the hormone. His group subsequently characterized many aspects of the HIF-pathway in the normal and diseased kidney, and evaluated opportunities to target the oxygen sensing mechanism. Dr Eckardt is funded by national (BMBF, DFG, DAAD) and international (EU) agencies. He has also served on steering committees of several large clinical trials. He is principal investigator of the German Chronic Kidney Disease (GCKD) study, the largest CKD cohort study worldwide, which provides novel insight into risk factors, molecular profiles and consequences of CKD. Dr Eckardt has published >500 papers, including more than 30 articles in high-impact interdisciplinary journals such as NEJM, Lancet, Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine, Nature Communication and J Clin Invest. His contributions are frequently cited (>39.000 citations; h-index 93, excluding self-citations).

Dr Eckardt is recipient of the Franz Volhard Prize of the German Society of Nephrology, the International Medal and the Garabed Eknoyan Award of the National Kidney Foundation (USA) and a Full Member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature (Mainz, Germany) since 2015.

He has served on scientific advisory boards of the German Research Foundation, the Dutch Kidney Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European Renal Association-European Dialysis and Transplant Association (ERA-EDTA; 2003-2006) and the International Society of Nephrology (ISN) (chair of the ISN Forefront Committee; 2004-2015). He was a founding Executive Committee member of Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) (2004-2015) and served as KDIGO Co-Chair from 2008 to 2012.

Furthermore, he has served on the editorial boards of Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, Kidney International, Journal of Molecular Medicine and the British Medical Journal.