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Biography:
Olivier Devuyst, M.D., Ph.D., graduated from UCLouvain in Brussels (Belgium) and trained at the Technion Institute (Haifa, Israel) and at the Johns Hopkins Medical School (Baltimore, USA). He is Full Professor of Medicine at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and the UCLouvain Medical School, with a joint appointment at Saint-Luc Academic Hospital in Brussels.
Dr. Devuyst and his group use a multi-level approach to investigate the genetic architecture of kidney diseases. This joint work identified new mechanisms involved in rare genetic disorders affecting tubular cells, paving the way for novel therapeutic approaches. In parallel, the team demonstrated the crucial role of water channels (aquaporins) in peritoneal dialysis and he developed preclinical strategies to improve the efficiency of dialysis.
O. Devuyst has authored more than 450 articles that are cited > 50’000 times (h-index 101). He is funded by national and international agencies including the EU and the NIH. He served as President and Board Member in the Belgian and Swiss societies of nephrology, coordinated several EU-funded research networks and established the Working Group on Inherited Kidney Disorders of the ERA. He co-chairs the University priority program on rare diseases in Zurich and is the coordinator of the Institute for Rare Diseases at Saint-Luc Hospital in Brussels.
Dr. Devuyst has been the laureate of several international prizes including the 2022 Chan Woon Cheung Visiting Professor of the Hong Kong Society of Nephrology, the 2019 D.G. Oreopoulos Award of the Canadian Society of Nephrology, and the 2019 ERA-EDTA Award for Outstanding Basic Science Contributions to Nephrology. He is Associate Editor of Kidney International, Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, and Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases; and he serves in the Editorial Board of Clin J Am Soc Nephrol, Peritoneal Dialysis International, Frontiers in Physiology and Pflügers Archiv.