Chronic Kidney Disease: Inflammation and Oxidative Stress in Pathogenesis and Clinical Course

Organizers

Colin Meyer, MD

Reata Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
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Colin Meyer is the Vice President, Product Development of Reata Pharmaceuticals and joined the company as its second employee. Meyer's primary role is to develop and implement strategies to move product candidates expeditiously through all stages of development. His duties include overseeing preclinical development, clinical pharmacology, and working with Reata's senior leadership team to design and implement development strategies for drug candidates. Meyer received a BS in chemistry with specialization in biochemistry and a BA in biology from the University of Virginia. He received an MD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and an MBA from Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business.

George Zavoico, PhD

MLV
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George B. Zavoico is Managing Director, Research, and a Senior Equity Research Analyst at MLV, a boutique investment bank and institutional broker-dealer based in New York. He has over 6 years of experience as a life sciences analyst writing research on publicly traded equities. Prior to MLV, he was an equity analyst with Westport Capital Markets and Cantor Fitzgerald. Prior to working as an analyst, Zavoico established his own consulting company serving the biotech and pharmaceutical industries by providing competitive intelligence and marketing research, due diligence services, and guidance in regulatory affairs. He also wrote extensively on healthcare and the biotech and pharmaceutical industries for periodicals targeting the general public and industry executives. Zavoico began his career as a Senior Research Scientist at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., moving on to management positions at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and T Cell Sciences, Inc. (now Celldex Therapeutics, Inc). He has a BS in Biology from St. Lawrence University and PhD in Physiology from the University of Virginia and has held post-doctoral positions at the University of Connecticut Health Sciences Center and Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Jennifer Henry, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences
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Jennifer Henry received her PhD in plant molecular biology from the University of Melbourne, Australia, with Paul Taylor at the University of Melbourne and Phil Larkin at CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra, specializing in the genetic engineering of transgenic crops. She was then appointed as Associate Editor, then Editor, of Functional Plant Biology at CSIRO Publishing. She moved to New York for her appointment as a Publishing Manager in the Academic Journals division at Nature Publishing Group, where she was responsible for the publication of biomedical journals in nephrology, clinical pharmacology, hypertension, dermatology, and oncology. Henry joined the Academy in 2009 as Director of Life Sciences and organizes 35 – 40 seminars each year. She is responsible for developing scientific content in coordination with the various life sciences Discussion Group steering committees, under the auspices of the Academy's Frontiers of Science program. She also generates alliances with outside organizations interested in the programmatic content.

Speakers

Jonathan M. Barasch, MD, PhD

Columbia University Medical Center
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Jonathan Barasch studied organic and biochemistry at Dartmouth College and then completed medical and graduate studies at Columbia where he is now an Associate Professor of Medicine and Cell Biology. He studies growth factors in the embryonic and adult kidney, focusing on iron transport.

ND Vaziri, MD

University of California, Irvine
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Nosratola "Nick" D. Vaziri is emeritus professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics at the University of California, Irvine, Schools of Medicine and Biological Science. He is former chair of the Department of Medicine and past president of the School of Medicine's academic senate at the University of California Irvine. He is a Master and a Laureate of the American College of Physicians, past president of the Western Association of Physicians, past president of the American Paraplegia Society, and recipient of numerous prestigious awards. He serves on the editorial board of several scientific journals. Vaziri has authored close to 500 original papers and 150 invited book chapters, reviews, and editorials. He has made seminal contributions to the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of lipid disorders, oxidative stress, and inflammation in chronic renal disease.

David Warnock, MD

University of Alabama at Birmingham
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David Warnock's research focuses on the factors, genetic and environmental, that contribute to hypertension and chronic kidney disease. The spectrum extends from basic studies of salt and water transport systems to population based studies of the prevalence of CKD and the association with stroke and heart disease. Another focus is inherited disorders of renal function, with a current emphasis on the renal manifestations of Fabry disease. Warnock received a BA from the University of California at Berkeley and received his MD from the University of California, San Francisco. His clinical training was completed at the University of California, San Francisco, including a 1-year research fellowship with Isidore Edelman in the Cardiovascular Research Institute. Following a fellowship with Maurice Burg at the NIH, Warnock returned to UCSF as a faculty member. He served as the Section Chief at the San Francisco VA Medical Center during the last 5 years of his appointment at UCSF. Following a sabbatical with Bernard Rossier at the Institute of Pharmacology in Lausanne, Switzerland, Warnock was recruited to UAB. Warnock's research interests include acid-base physiology, sodium transport mechanisms, chronic kidney disease, diabetes and kidney disease, and inherited renal diseases.

Colin Meyer, MD

Reata Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
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Jennifer Cable, PhD

Jennifer Cable resides in New York City, where she experiments with different methods and outlets to communicate science. She enjoys bringing science to scientists and nonscientists alike. She writes for Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, Bitesize Bio, Under the Microscope, and the Nature New York blog. She received a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her research in investigating the structure/function relationship of proteins.