Katharina Hopp, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado, Denver, where her lab studies the functional role of immune cells on PKD progression. Dr Katharina Hopp obtained her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with a focus on Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD) genetics from the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. She continued her research in PKD as a post-doctoral fellow at the Mayo Clinic Translational PKD Center.

She is the recipient of the Dr Vincent H. Gattone Research Award from the PKD Foundation (2018).

Dr Vishal Patel, MD is a Tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center. He obtained his medical degree from India in 2000 and completed his Internal Medicine residency at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) in 2004. A stint in a kidney research laboratory at Northwestern sparked his interest in Nephrology. Subsequently, he completed a clinical Nephrology fellowship at UT Southwestern (Dallas, TX) in 2005 and then joined the kidney genetics laboratory of Peter Igarashi, MD, at UT Southwestern as an NIH-funded physician-scientist trainee. His early work involved studying the role of primary cilia in polycystic kidney disease pathogenesis (PKD). In 2009, he started his independent laboratory with a focus on understanding the role of non-coding RNAs in PKD. This work has now evolved to understanding basic RNA biology (translation regulation, RNA chemical modifications, etc.) and developing RNA-based therapeutics approaches for PKD and other kidney genetic disorders. Dr Patel’s lab has been continuously funded by the NIH since 2009, and he receives additional funding from the Department of Defense and the PKD foundation.

Dr Patel is also the Director of a Comprehensive PKD and kidney genetics clinic at UT Southwestern. He serves on the editorial board of Scientific Reports, numerous NIH and DoD grant study sections, is the vice-chair of the scientific advisory committee for the PKD Foundation and has served as a consultant for various pharmaceutical companies. He has mentored many junior scientists, including one who is now a K08-funded Physician-Scientist.

Sachin Hajarnis, PhD is a Senior Clinical and Scientific Liaison at Otsuka Pharmaceuticals. Dr Hajarnis has a Bachelors and Masters in Life Sciences from University of Mumbai, India. He obtained a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Colorado State University. Dr Hajarnis joined the University of Texas Southwestern Medical school in Dallas, as a post-doctoral fellow in the department of Nephrology where he performed basic research on various aspects of Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD). He continued his studies on the role of micro-RNAs in PKD as a Research Scientist for several years before joining his current position at Otsuka.