June Fabian University of Witwatersrand, Faculty of Health SciencesSouth Africa

I trained at Wits as a medical doctor and specialised in nephrology, and I am the Director of Clinical Research at Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre. My research focus is kidney disease epidemiology in Africa. My doctoral work involved determining the population prevalence and associated risk factors for kidney disease in rural South Africans in collaboration with longitudinal population cohorts in Uganda and Malawi, collectively known as the African Research of Kidney Disease (ARK) Consortium. To date, we have shown that creatinine-based estimates of kidney function are inaccurate in African populations and that cystatin C performs better. Furthermore, traditional risk factors associated with kidney disease in high-income settings, such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity, are less commonly identified in African populations suggesting non-traditional risks that remain understudied. We plan to investigate non-traditional causes of kidney disease, the impacts of heat stress on kidney function and create longitudinal cohorts in partner sites that will be able to determine kidney disease progression, incidence, and associated mortality. We have a strong network of local, continental, and international collaborators - London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK), Vanderbilt University (USA), Variant Bio (USA), and the University of Pennsylvania (USA). I am deeply committed to research excellence in Africa and capacitating the next generation of African scientists. I want to create a corpus of outstanding research that accurately represents African populations in global science, redresses inequities, and improves human life and the care we provide in Africa and more broadly.