Abhijit Naik, MBBS

Abhijit (Jeet) spent his formative years in the vibrant city of Mumbai, India, where he completed his medical degree at Grant Medical College. Driven by his interest in human health and quantitative analysis, he pursued further graduate training at the University of Alabama in Birmingham to become an epidemiologist and data scientist. He is a board-certified specialist in Nephrology by the American Board of Internal Medicine, with additional subspecialty training in Kidney Transplantation.

He completed his Nephrology and Kidney Transplantation training at the University of Chicago, under the mentorship of Michelle Josephson, the current ASN president, and Richard J. Quigg in glomerular diseases. Beginning his career as a clinical faculty member at the University of Michigan, he was inspired by Roger C. Wiggins' foundational work on podocyte depletion and its role in FSGS. This inspiration led him to investigate the role of podocyte depletion in limiting long-term allograft survival in rejecting and non-rejecting kidney allografts. His work earned him a Career Development Award (K23) from the National Institutes of Health to train as a Physician Scientist in Systems Biology under Dr. Matthias Kretzler. Dr. Kretzler, who leads the NEPTUNE and Kidney Precision Medicine projects, is a distinguished systems biologist and prolific researcher.

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Currently, his research focuses on understanding the role of kidney growth per se in driving kidney and glomerular disease progression in diseases such as obesity and diabetes, which are characterized by kidney growth early in the disease process. Insights from these studies are pivotal in understanding the role of kidney allograft growth, a common occurrence after kidney transplantation, and its impact on reducing long-term allograft survival.

His ultimate goal is to apply a systems biology approach to kidney transplantation, incorporating morphometric data from biopsies, functional data from electronic medical records, and genotype-level data from kidney donors and recipients. The hypotheses from such approaches are tested in prospective biosample and biofluid acquisition built around Michigan’s surveillance and indication biopsy program. The Biosample and Biofluid collection is aligned with Kidney Precision Medicine to facilitate synergy with such large networks. He currently leads the Michigan Kidney Transplant (Biorepository) and the ImPREC study, a multi-organ transplant biorepository funded through intramural grants from UM’s philanthropic Alfred Taubman Center.