University of Zurich

Biographical Sketch

Prof. Dr. med. Olivier Devuyst, M.D., Ph.D., graduated from UCLouvain in Brussels (Belgium) and trained in Brussels and at the Technion Institute (Haifa, Israel) and the Johns Hopkins Medical School (Baltimore, USA). He is Full Professor of Medicine at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and has a joint appointment in nephrology at Saint-Luc Academic Hospital in Brussels.

Dr. Devuyst and his group use a multi-level approach combining innovative disease models, deep phenotyping, and molecular and population genetics to investigate the mechanisms of solute and water transport in different cell types, and the pathophysiology of inherited kidney diseases. This joint work identified new mechanisms involved in rare genetic disorders affecting tubular cells and their relevance for kidney physiology, paving the way for novel therapeutic approaches. In parallel, the team demonstrated the crucial role of water channels (aquaporins) in peritoneal dialysis and he developed preclinical strategies to improve the efficiency of dialysis.

O. Devuyst has authored more than 350 articles that are cited > 20’000 times (h-index 77). He is funded by national and international agencies including the EU and the NIH. He served as President and Board Member in the Belgian and Swiss societies of nephrology, coordinated several EU-funded research networks and has founded the Working Group on Inherited Kidney Disorders (WGIKD) of the ERA-EDTA in 2011.

Dr. Devuyst is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium and has been the laureate of several international prizes including the 2019 D.G. Oreopoulos Award of the Canadian Society of Nephrology and the 2019 ERA-EDTA Award for Outstanding Basic Science Contributions to Nephrology. He is Associate Editor of Kidney International, Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, and Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases; and he serves in the Editorial Board of Clin J Am Soc Nephrol, Peritoneal Dialysis International, Frontiers in Physiology and Pflügers Archiv.