Joseph V. Bonventre MD PhD is Samuel A. Levine Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School. He is Chief of the Division of Renal Medicine of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and also Chief of the Biomedical Engineering Division, which he founded, at the BWH. Dr. Bonventre’s research focuses primarily on the study of kidney injury and repair and signal transduction, with a special emphasis on the role of inflammation, biomarkers and stem cells. His laboratory published the first demonstration of creation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines from individuals with polycystic kidney diseas. These cells and cells differentiated from the iPSCs have an abnormality with plausable significance for understanding the etiology of the disease. iPS cells generated from fibroblasts of humans with autosomal dominant PKD had reduced ciliary levels of polycystin-2 which could be rescued in iPS-derived hepatoblasts by overexpression of polycystin-1. This work opens up the possibility to conduct “clinical trials in a dish” of potential novel therapies for PKD using patient-specific cells. His laboratory also recently reported a rapid and efficient process by which human iPS and embryonic stem (ES) cells can be differentiated into intermediate mesoderm that forms tubules expressing kidney proximal tubule markers. His laboratory is one of only a handful in the world that has been successful at directed differentiation to kidney lineage cells, and is one of the leading labs in this effort in the US. He has a great deal of experience with various animal models of AKI and chronic kidney disease.