Research Awards Recipients

Dr. Michael Zappitelli is a pediatric nephrology fellow who obtained his MD at McGill University in Montreal and completed a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Stuart Goldstein at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, one of the largest pediatric centres in North America.

His research is on acute kidney injury (AKI) in children. AKI mostly occurs in hospitalized patients and must be better understood in order to detect the disease earlier, lessen the most serious risks and improve patients’ long-term health. His clinical research laboratory is characterizing this disease by evaluating definitions and performing studies to assess the effect of AKI on various outcomes in several diagnostic populations. Included are patients on nephrotoxic medications, patients undergoing cardiac surgery and critically ill patients. His latest studies examine the long-term outcomes of AKI in cardiac and non-cardiac critically ill patients and in children treated for cancer with cisplatin. He aims to evaluate whether AKI is a risk factor for chronic kidney disease (CKD) and whether new AKI biomarkers of renal tubular damage can be used to better diagnose patients at risk of CKD. Other projects focus on discovering and characterizing novel AKI urine protein biomarkers for AKI diagnosis.