Washington University in St. Louis (WU)
My research interests center on kidney transplant injury, repair, and inter-organ inflammatory crosstalk. I study how kidney allograft injury – particularly delayed graft function and renal epithelial stress – can propagate beyond the kidney to influence systemic inflammation and remote organ dysfunction, especially lung injury. I use single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, human allograft biopsy datasets, and experimental kidney injury models to identify tubular injury states, immune–epithelial interactions, and osteopontin/SPP1-associated pathways. My emerging translational focus is to define how kidney injury-released osteopontin may contribute to remote lung inflammation in human organ donors, with the long-term goal of developing donor-side biomarkers and mechanistic strategies to improve transplant outcomes. Complementing this biologic work, I also pursue patient-safety and quality-improvement research to standardize delayed graft function management after kidney transplantation.